Today you’ll learn about how children raised by same sex couples are just as psychologically healthy as other kids, how face blindness might be way more common than we think, and how paid sick leave is now scientifically proven to benefit both businesses and employees.
Today you’ll learn about how children raised by same sex couples are just as psychologically healthy as other kids, how face blindness might be way more common than we think, and how paid sick leave is now scientifically proven to benefit both businesses and employees.
Same Sex Same Kids
Face Blindness
Paid Sick Leave
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Find episode transcripts here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/same-sex-same-kids-face-blindness-paid-sick-leave
NATE: Hi! You’re about to get smarter in just a few minutes with Curiosity Daily from Discovery. Time flies when you’re learnin’ super cool stuff. I’m Nate.
CALLI: And I’m Calli. If you’re dropping in for the first time, welcome to Curiosity, where we aim to blow your mind by helping you to grow your mind. If you’re a loyal listener, welcome back!
NATE: Today you’ll learn about how children raised by same sex couples are just as psychologically healthy as other kids, how face blindness might be way more common than we think, and how paid sick leave is now scientifically proven to benefit both businesses and employees.
CALLI: Without further ado, let’s satisfy some curiosity!
[SFX: WHOOSH]
CALLI: All right. So a new study by BMJ Global Health has found that children of same sex couples develop just as well, and in some cases even better than their friends from heterosexual households.
NATE: Ooh, this is interesting. I personally and anecdotally, I would think that seems kind of obvious, but it's always good to have science to back up what's an opinion.
CALLI: Exactly. And I completely agree with you. This feels pretty obvious. But according to the Census Bureau, there are around 1.2 million same sex couple households in the United States as of 2021, and around 15% of those households have children. That's a lot of kids.
NATE: That is a lot of kids.
CALLI: And it's not just a big deal because we all want kids to do well, but also because same sex households are a relatively new phenomenon due to an increase in LGBTQ plus rights over the last century. And there have been some interest over how children of same sex couples would fare developmentally due to the change in what the nuclear family looks like. Turns out obviously they do just fine, but with some caveats.
NATE: Okay. Caveats like what?
CALLI: Okay. So we're going to back up a little bit and talk about the study itself. It was actually a study of studies. So researchers looked at 34 studies published between 1989 and 2022. They looked at things like child parent relationships and psychological adjustment, both of which, by the way, the kids from same sex households did better than their peers in heterosexual households.
NATE: Okay. Doing better isn't exactly a scientific term, though. So specifically, what does it mean in this case? What's being measured?
CALLI: In this case, we're talking about better mental health overall and fewer cases of psychological issues. They also looked at family functioning, the quality and satisfaction of relationships within the family, parental, mental health, parenting, stress and so on. And the kids of LGBTQ plus parents did no better and no worse than their peers.
NATE: Okay, so that all sounds pretty good. You mentioned there's a caveat. What is that?
CALLI: Well, I mean, again, this feels a little on the nose, but they only looked at studies from countries where same sex marriage or partnerships are legal.
NATE: Oh, okay. Yeah, I guess that makes sense. It seems like it'd probably be quite a bit harder to gather data in countries where it's not legal.
CALLI: True. And potentially unsafe. But it's also possible that the outcomes for kids in those locations aren't as positive. And that is the bigger story here.
NATE: How so? What do you mean?
CALLI: This study found that the sexual orientation and even the gender identity of a kid's parents is way less important than the quality of the parenting and the relationships within the family in places where it's legal. So in other words.
NATE: It's not the family and parenting that's the issue. It's the society around the family.
CALLI: Exactly. That's the idea here. These families in general showed higher levels of warmth, better interaction and more supportive relationships. But in places where they're not accepted earnestly, they will invariably face difficulty. But that difficulty has nothing to do with the quality of the family itself or the quality of parenting. This study refers to this as relevant social risk factors, and they include stigma and discrimination and poor social support.
NATE: I mean, I guess a good family is going to be a good family no matter what it looks like.
CALLI: Yeah. And the biggest adversity a kid in a same sex household is going to face comes from people who haven't read this study.
[SFX: WHOOSH]
NATE: Not long ago, we did a story talking about super recognizers; people who are incredibly good at recognizing faces and can actually recognize people better than some computer software. Well, today we're doing a story about the opposite. Face blindness.
CALLI: Okay, so face blindness. I've had this happen before where I'll come up to somebody and be talking to them and they'll be like, who are you again? And sometimes I think maybe they're just being rude, but maybe I'm the rude one because this is an actual condition where our minds can trick us into believing we recognize people we've never met or make us fail to recognize people we already have. Is that is that what we're talking about here?
NATE: Yeah. And to be fair, face blindness or prosopagnosia, as it's officially known, was originally estimated to affect only around two and a half percent of the US population at most. But a new study has dropped that makes the case that prosopagnosia might actually be a lot more common than we previously believed. And though it seems like it might not be that big of a deal, the condition can be pretty debilitating.
CALLI: I mean, okay, but how common are we talking here?
NATE: So 3.0%, which I know doesn't seem like a huge increase over the previous estimate, but and this might blow your mind. That's still one in every 33 people or more than 10 million Americans. Well, that means if you had a super unlucky streak, you could meet 10 million people in a row and not a single one of them would remember your face afterwards. Or if you were lucky, some of them might think that they had already met you when they hadn't.
CALLI: I mean, as an introvert, I would say meeting 10 million people in a row is already unlucky.
NATE: But there's no lucky scenario in which I meet 10 million people in a row.
CALLI: But I am curious, how did they even figure out so many people might have undiagnosed prosopagnosia?
NATE: The new study was led by Joseph DeGutis is an associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical, whose team sent out a web based questionnaire and set of tests to 3341 people. First, researchers asked if participants experienced difficulty recognizing faces in their day to day lives. Then they gave the participants two tests that were more objective in nature to figure out whether they actually had difficulties learning new faces or recognizing any highly familiar, more famous faces. After tallying up the results, they discovered that 31 of the participants suffered from major prosopagnosia and an additional 72 had a milder form.
CALLI: Okay, that is nuts. So what causes prosopagnosia and what are some of the difficulties that these people that suffer from it might face?
NATE: So it can be genetic, but it's believed to be caused in most cases by brain injury, specifically to the occipital or temporal regions. And I should note that this study in particular focused on the developmental rather than the acquired version of prosopagnosia. And as for why it should matter, it's underdiagnosed, it's often disregarded, and it can really be socially debilitating. It can limit employment options since networking is hard for people who can't recognize people. You were giving a scenario in which someone didn't recognize you? Like if that happened to you a lot, like not being recognized is a social stigma because it implies that someone isn't important enough to be remembered. But this study proposes that we need to expand the criteria for how we diagnose someone with prosopagnosia. Because what was most interesting to the researchers was that there wasn't really an even division of people who could poorly recognize faces or properly recognize them.
CALLI: What does that all boiled down to? Basically.
NATE: Facial recognition lies on a spectrum. Some people were just okay, recognizing faces to varying degrees, and it's not clear if prosopagnosia will get worse as time goes on. But it is now clear that facial blindness, even at a mild level, could be a warning sign of some other kind of cognitive decline. A diagnosis can help someone take the steps to reduce the negative impacts facial blindness could have on their lives, like being able to tell their coworkers about their trouble or even seeking some form of treatment.
CALLI: Yeah, and that actually brings up the question how is this treated?
NATE: Unfortunately, there is no universally accepted form of treatment for it. Not. Not even one. That's how under regarded the condition is in the medical field. Thankfully, there is research that suggests that people with milder forms of it could benefit from things like cognitive training, which could enhance their perceptual abilities or even training that focuses specifically on face associations.
CALLI: This is this is something I feel like we really need to focus a little bit more on. So what is the takeaway here?
NATE: Face blindness is a lot more common than we thought, especially since it lies on a spectrum. There's a good chance that with the expanded criteria, that 3% number from earlier might even end up looking a little conservative in the future. Nevertheless, for the time being, the best thing we can do is spread the word that face blindness is a real thing, and maybe the medical field can develop some treatments for it.
[SFX: WHOOSH]
CALLI: Did you know that the United States is one of the few developed countries that doesn't guarantee paid sick time? I didn't. And to the surprise of no one, non paid sick time has now been scientifically proven to have huge negative consequences.
NATE: I love a good story about science supporting workers rights. This is cool. Tell me more about this.
CALLI: All right. Well, you might remember that between March and December of 2020, there was a temporary federal law providing paid sick leave to some employees in the U.S.. That was the only time the entire country was guaranteed paid sick leave, though. But a new study by Florida Atlantic University and Cleveland State University researchers found some pretty compelling evidence that there are huge benefits of organizations providing paid sick leave.
NATE: How did they test that and what did they find?
CALLI: So the researchers meticulously went over 22 years of research that looked into the relationship between paid sick leave benefits and U.S. business outcomes in both the short and long term. They took a number of factors in consideration when they did this, like business size, which industry was represented and whether or not paid sick leave was required due to a law. And what they found was huge. Paid sick leave is linked to less job related injury, less contagious disease, and therefore less presenteeism.
NATE: What is presenteeism?
CALLI: So that's the act of going to work when you know you're sick. Presenteeism kind of ties all of these concepts together because if you're not at work sick, you aren't risking the health of your other coworkers. Plus another thing paid sick leave is linked to: less employee death. In fact, paid sick leave is linked more through this study to favorable business conditions like high employee morale and job satisfaction rates, longevity in job status and higher profitability.
NATE: Okay. I feel like it's, you know, common knowledge that we don't have paid sick leave here in the U.S. because it's bad for business. So this is actually pretty surprising.
CALLI: And that's similar to what some of the researchers themselves said. They were a bit shocked to discover that there isn't really any evidence that paid sick leave is harmful to a business's bottom line. To be fair, they did notice an increase in worker absences in businesses with paid sick leave, but they were small and that number was completely offset by all of the other bonuses, especially since most of those bonuses were related to how valuable it is for a sick employee to stay home. People who go to work sick are actually costing their companies a lot of money.
NATE: How much money?
CALLI: Some sources say billions of dollars annually. Others say hundreds of billions. One American productivity audit estimated that decreased productivity due to presenteeism costs the U.S. economy more than $150 billion per year.
NATE: Wow. That's that's insane. And even outside of the money, people who go to work sick are typically not firing on all cylinders. And of course, they can get other people sick. So what is there to be done so that we can get federal paid sick leave?
CALLI: There's not much we can do. Unfortunately. This is really between business and the government. There has been a lot of push both for and against paid sick leave over the past decade. What this study proposes is that there are far more benefits to ensuring paid sick leave than there are negatives, especially since the availability of paid sick leave is often linked to differences in social status in America.
NATE: How so?
CALLI: Well paid sick leave is available for 92% of Americans that are in the top 4% of all earners, but it's only available to just over 50% of the lowest earners. Those are people who work in food service, hospitality or retail, which means that they're right on the frontlines of our community. And if they go to work sick, they're not just risking themselves or their coworkers, they're risking us, too. Because this study found that paid sick leave is actually associated with a lower spread of disease in the entire region, meaning that it wouldn't just be workers and it wouldn't just be businesses, paid sick leave would benefit the entire community.
NATE: Okay. So healthier workers, happier workers, more money for the businesses, longer lifespan. Really hard to see. Any downsides here?
CALLI: Yeah. Win, win.
[SFX: WHOOSH]
NATE: Let’s recap what we learned today to wrap up.
CALLI: A new study shows that kids from same-sex households do just as well - and in some cases even better psychologically - than their peers in heterosexual households.
NATE: The next time somebody doesn’t recognize you, don’t take it personally: they might have face blindness! A new study out of Harvard has revealed that prosopagnosia, the inability to recognize faces you’ve seen before, might be more common than previously believed. Furthermore, we now know that it might exist on a spectrum - meaning that there could be even more people suffering from varying degrees of this than we even know now!
CALLI: The United States is one of the only developed countries that doesn’t offer federal paid sick leave, but new research suggests that we should change that. Paid sick leave is found to be related to better health standards in the entire community, as well as increased productivity, increased profits, and an overall better quality of life. There’s not much we can do to fix it except nudge anybody listening in the direction of the evidence that says things can be a lot better!