When Baby Bumps Spell Danger
by Dr. Bonnie Eaker Weil
If it seems like everyone around you is pregnant – maybe you’re even one of the pregnant ones! – you’re not crazy. More and more people are having kids, and many are having their third or fourth child. In 2007, American women gave birth to 4.3 million babies – that’s more than every before! And of those 4.3 million, more than a quarter of those babies were born to women either on their third or fourth child. An article in Women’s Health points out this doesn’t mean we’re all rushing to ensure our buns are in the oven, or that family size is growing exponentially – in fact, the average number of children per American family is still close to two.
But this birthing trend can reveal some issues that are less than warm-and-fuzzy. The problem may actually start with those feel-good hormones people experience during pregnancy along with the attention from friends and family. But wanting to re-capture those feelings, even subconsciously, can make for an unhealthy outcome – and an unhealthy relationship with your baby.
According to psychiatrist Carole Lieberman, M. D, “Women who are obsessed with being pregnant are literally filling an emptiness inside of them, just as alcoholics and drug addicts use substances to fill a psychological void.” It makes sense: we all want to feel less lonely, and for many, babies help them do just that. And this “fix” can easily become a cycle – when an infant becomes a more independent toddler the mom may search to fill the void again by having another baby.
These “bumpaholic” behaviors can ao be traced back feelings of abandonment by their own parents, which in turn creates that desire to not be alone or lonely. We have a biochemical craving for connection, as I mention in my book Financial Infidelity, that spurs us on to want to connect with the important people in our lives. When those needs aren’t met by our parents, we can try to overcompensate for that as we become parents ourselves, by looking to create a large family. Or it can be a reflection of the abandonment people feel from their significant other, or from life in general. As our society becomes busier and busier we pull away more and more from the relationships that should be an integral part of our lives. Creating a baby with someone not only allows us to feel close to that person, but gives us someone to lavish our affection, emotion and energy on.
These are all dangerous reasons for bringing kids into the world! Just as alcoholics must examine their relationship to alcohol and what drives them into the destructive habit, so too must a mom looking for fulfillment through pregnancy look at her reasons for doing so.
Do you stash cash?
by Dr. Bonnie Eaker Weil
No, I’m not talking about an emergency supply you may have in a kit for a natural disaster or the like (in which case you SHOULD stash your money!), I’m talking about those of us who have a habit of keeping our cash around the house. It’s even more understandable given the recent collapse of banks and all this uncertainty, but consider the example – albeit extreme – of the woman in Tel Aviv who had stashed $1 million in cash under her mattress (literally), which was then hauled away to the dump. The cash still hasn’t been recovered.
According to MSNBC, statistics on the number of people in the U.S. who stash cash at home are hard to come by, but a 2007 survey of 1,500 British adults by Virgin Money found 8 percent of them stash between approximately $500 to $1,650 around the house, usually tucked within a drawer, mattress or safe.
Utilizing a safe may be one thing, but too often cash-stashers don’t secure their loot behind a combination lock, which can lead to all kinds of problems – the money accidentally being thrown out, donated (when stashed inside a jacket pocket for instance), or stolen. Then you have the risk of fire or even forgetting where you put it!
An exercise I suggest in my book to people who have unhealthy relationships to and with money is to figure out their financial Imago, which I discuss in my book Financial Infidelity – which deals with peoples’ romantic relationships as well as their relationship with money.
Depending on your stage in life, and your stage in the relationship, there are crucial questions you need to answer. How do you feel about debt? How much debt do you have? Are you a risk-taker or are you risk-averse? Will the kids go to private school? Will we fund their college education in its entirety? Who will pay when we go out? How often will we go out and how often will we eat in?
Of course, these are only a few, sample questions to touch on before you head into significant life changes, but they are a good place to start. Many times you many not even know how to answer those questions yourself, much less how you will answer them as a couple. And just as often, you will have a knee-jerk reaction as to how to answer them that may be completely opposite from your partners. It’s always best to get those reactions out in the open before you find yourself “in the heat of battle!”
If you uncover that your passion for stashin’ is somewhat hereditary, you may want to go around emptying out drawers of heirloom dressers … JUST KIDDING!