"Trading Spouses" Teaches Relationship Building Through Cooking

Last night I watched a television show. It was rather hilarious and disturbing at the same time.

I was actually talking to my mother when I first heard about it. I called her to chat and she told me she was watching this show called 'Trading Spouses'. Isn't that name terrible?

I couldn't believe my Mom was watching such a thing.

But, after she told me about it, it sounded hilarious, so I decided to check it out when it came on in my time zone (we have a four hour time difference). And she was right, it was hilarious. So, I watched it with my husband last night.

Now, I'm not a big reality show fan. So, I'll get to the point in a second.

So, anyway, last night's show was about two husbands that traded places. The one was a New York City lawyer who lived in Manhattan ' and he changed places with a low income worker who lived in the country in Georgia.

(Okay, and just to clarify for those of you whose minds might be going elsewhere ' there was no hanky panky going on')

So, you can imagine the difference in life style!

The country guy had his very first plane ride to get to New York, and he was blown away by the speed of life. The rich man's kids were great; but his wife was a witch. Shocked that he was never at a restaurant that required dressing up, bragging about their beach home being worth $2-3 million, freaking out when someone walked into the kitchen with sand on their shoes, and nagging and pushing the son about getting his bar mitzvah speech right ' especially since the affair was costing about as much as a wedding.

They city guy was in culture shock too. The house was run down and messy; and the kids were NIGHTMARES! They were totally out of control.

Unfortunately, I have seen kids that bad before in real life ' but it's been awhile. They were hitting, fighting, ignoring their mom, telling the man to 'shut up' ' can you believe it? And this was good behavior in front of the television crew and visitors? It was really awful.

So, here were two examples of BAD family relationships. A rich family with kids that behaved - but they couldn't enjoy their family life because it was to much 'go, go go' with a Mom that was wound up so tight that she'd wring the enjoyment out of everything. And a low income family with a family life ' but one that sucked because the Mom couldn't stand to be around her kids.

Oh ' and you know what the Mom said about her bratty kids? She said that she 'tried everything'. She tried sitting down and talking with them, she tried taking away toys, she tried sitting them in time-out. She tried it all, but nothing worked. Hmmmmm. Seems she left out THE MOST IMPORTANT ONE! The controlled, loving, whack across the caboose.

When are parents going to 'get it' that loving, proper, consistent discipline when they're young means that they'll be controlled, loving, children that behave when they are 6, 7, and up.

AND ' children can't be happy if they aren't disciplined. You can see it on their faces. Whiney, out-of-control children are miserable. And so is everyone around them, for that matter.

When's the last time that you've seen a miserable, well disciplined child? You haven't. I mean, there are a few moments of bad attitude or whatever that quickly goes away with correction; but they are basically happy, content, and secure.

So, anyway, back to my story.

Each family was getting $50,000 for the trade. But the catch was that the visiting spouse made the decision of how the other family would spend their $50,000. The rich man's answer to fix the low income family? Buy the house, remodel it ' basically improve material possessions.

The country man's answer to fix the wealthy family? Family relationship counseling, cooking lessons, and family vacation time.

And you guessed it ' the rich wife flipped out ' she was planning on using the $50,000 to pay for her son's bar mitzvah!!

But, I'll say one thing. The country man was right on for what that family needed. Less focus on 'things' and more focus on 'relationships'.

Actually, he was downright clever. He showed America the #1 way to build family relationships'Cooking together.

Ahem. Ring a bell?

Cooking creates family bonds ' across all ages ' across all abilities. Too bad the country man didn't have more of that wisdom to have disciplined kids too.

So, if you're already ahead of the game with well behaved kids ' don't forget about the relationship side of things. And don't overlook the easiest, most funnest ( he, he), I mean 'fun' way to spend time with you kids ' COOKING!!!!

About the author: Laura Bankston is author of 'Homeschool Cooking in a Box' and the 'Homeschool Cookbook'. She currently home schools her three children, maintains home school support websites, and manages their family-owned service business. For information on her curriculum and free home school support services, please visit http://www.homeschoolcookbook.com

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Facebook and Zynga's relationship: Just how shady is it?

Last month we talked about some of the details of an exclusive relationship between Zynga and Facebook that was revealed in their S-1 IPO filings. Some of these things were more obvious and less ominous, such as the requirement for Zynga to keep certain games on Facebook exclusively and not port them to other social networks or platforms. However, there was one little line in there that left behind a lot of uncertainty for social game developers:

The parties further acknowledge that Zynga is making a significant commitment to the Facebook Platform (i.e., using Facebook as the exclusive Social Platform on the Zynga Properties and granting FB certain title exclusivities to Zynga games on the Facebook Platform). In exchange for such commitment, the parties have committed to set certain growth targets for monthly unique users of Covered Zynga Games.

No one is exactly sure what this means, but one thing is for certain -- Zynga's Empires & Allies monthly active users graph looks particularly suspicious. In the line graph shown above, you can see the Empires and Allies peaked in traffic on July 9. From there, you can see that the game started to dramatically decline in numbers, which you will see in almost every Facebook game ever released. Social games on Facebook have an exciting climb up to their peak and then fall in numbers, spiking only with the release of new features.

However, you can see that starting on July 18, the monthly active user numbers have remained almost exactly flat. No growth, only a tiny decline that is the difference of thousands, not millions. Never before has the graph of a game looked like this. I'll go ahead and say it -- this is that Zynga/Facebook relationship at work. Facebook are doing something to help Empires & Allies remain at 45 million MAU.

It wouldn't be possible for Zynga to buy ads to keep their numbers exactly this flat. With the delayed reporting on Facebook ads, you can't buy daily ads with the intention of getting an exact number of users per day. You can't even really come all that close - especially when you're dealing with traffic numbers in the 45 million range. Especially when the daily active usage of the game looks like this:

In addition, Empires & Allies isn't retaining players well. The game is hovering between 15-17% of their monthly users coming back each day. With this kind of churn and this much fluctuation in terms of their daily playerbase, it's obvious that Facebook is pumping traffic in some fashion to the game to keep the numbers flat. They could be tweaking the ad algorithm, or doing a number of things to help Zynga maintain this number in Empires & Allies. Perhaps they are doing this until Zynga's IPO; no one can really be sure.

Other social game studios have every reason to be angry about this deal. Facebook is essentially helping the titan maintain its prowess over all the other studios, giving smaller developers little chance to make up ground. Sure, a lot of Zynga's success is compounded on their previous success -- no one is denying that Zynga are the leaders in the space. However, Facebook's special treatment feels malicious to me. It's hard enough to compete with the Zyngas and EAs of the space without having to deal with Facebook siding with a developer.

[Chart images via AppData.com]

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Facebook Adds New Relationship Status Types, but Not to the Ad Tool

Facebook is rolling out the option for users to set their relationship status to “In a civil union” and “In a domestic partnership”. These types will allow gay couples to more accurately describe their relationship. However, advertisers don’t have the option to target users based on these types, or any other types than “Single”, “In a relationship”, “Engaged”, or “Married”.

Users can change the setting by going Edit Profile, then Featured People, and using the Relationship Status drop-down menu. Not all users have the new options yet, though.

Facebook has been slowly increasing the number of relationship status types. “Widowed” became an option in September 2009, and Facebook has since added “Divorced” and “Separated”, though none of these are targetable through the ad tool. The site recently released statistics that showed that users who are “In a relationship”, “Married”, or “Engaged” are much happier according to the Gross National Happiness index than users with the status “In an open relationship”, “It’s complicated”, or “Widowed”.

The added status types show Facebook’s continued support for the gay community. It released an “It Gets Better” video featuring employees encouraging gay adolescents not to harm themselves, worked with Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation to remove hateful content from a Page commemorating victims of anti-gay bullying, and reimburses taxes for gay employees who cover their spouses’ health care costs since the federal government doesn’t recognize their relationships.

Several Facebook Pages and groups had previously been created calling for civil unions and domestic partnerships to be added as relationship status options. By recognizing these types and allowing users to more accurately express themselves, users will feel that their Facebook profile is a natural expression of their identity.

As Facebook adds more relationship status options that aren’t in the ad tool, users will switch to them, decreasing the number of people in the targetable options. This can help advertisers because they won’t be accidentally showing ads to those who aren’t actually in the demographic they’re trying to reach. The new types will hurt advertisers, though, since less users will list targetable options like “Married” or “In a relationship” that may have been close enough to show them relevant ads.

Facebook should consider adding all the available relationship status types as targeting parameters to offer advertisers as much targeting granularity as possible, even if it might slightly complicate the ad tool. This would allow the site to continue providing more accurate options to users without impairing advertisers

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