Cherishing Behaviors For Couples: Some Suggestions  

When you are reading this, you will recall some of the pleasing and delightful behaviors that drew you to each other during courtship, or which were practiced during some happy times or even in crisis times. Select from this list, or one of your own, two or three cherishing behaviors you might be willing to practice.

-Call me during the day and tell me something pleasant.
-Ask me how I spent my day and for a few minutes give me your undivided attention.
-Fix the coffee in the morning so we can have a few minutes to talk before starting the day.
-Enjoy touching me.

By: Colette Dowling, LMSW

Women actually learn low self-confidence; they're trained for it. Studies show that girls--especially smarter ones--have severe problems with self-confidence. They consistently underestimate their own ability. When asked how they think they'll do on different tasks--whether the tasks are untried or ones they've encountered before--they give lower estimates than boys do, and in general underestimate their actual performance as well.

Low self-confidence is the plague of many girls and it leads to a host of related problems. Girls are highly suggestible and tend to change their minds about perceptual judgments if someone disagrees with them. They set lower standards for themselves. While boys are challenged by difficult tasks, little boys demonstrate MORE task involvement, MORE self-confidence, and are MORE likely to show incremental increases in IQ.

By the age of six, the cards are in on probable intellectual development, just as they are in on probable independence development. By this age a predictive picture will have emerged. The six-year-old whose IQ is going to increase in subsequent years is the child who is already competitive, self-assertive, independent, and dominating with other children, Eleanor Maccoby, a Stanford researcher, found. (The information from Maccoby that you see here can be found in The Psychology of Sex Differences, published by Stanford University Press.) Maccoby noted that a six-year-old whose IQ would probably decline in the following years was passive, shy, and dependent. "On this evidence," she wrote, pointedly, "the characteristics of those whose IQs will rise do not seem very feminine."