Mother's Day roundup and other stories

With Mother's Day coming up, I've noticed a lot of stories about parenting in the papers. I've included some links below, plus links to some other fun stories.

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The "hot mom" or the MILF seems to come up in conversation more often lately. A Chicago Sun-Times story "Sex, love and motherhood" looks at how women are redefining what it means to be a mom.

"There was this stigma about being a mom," says Denay, 31, a former teacher and counselor who also worked as a private tutor to actor Pierce Brosnan's son. "People would say, 'You don't look like a mom.' Well, what does a mom look like? The biggest thing with moms is getting in the mind-set that you are still desirable, and that part of you needs to be nurtured."

Denay has a book out, called "The Hot Mom's Handbook: Moms Have More Fun!", and has a website called the Hot Moms Club.

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The New York Times had an often gory story about animals that are less then exemplary mothers, titled "One Thing They Aren't: Maternal".

As much as we may like to believe that mother animals are designed to nurture and protect their young, to fight to the death, if need be, to keep their offspring alive, in fact, nature abounds with mothers that defy the standard maternal script in a raft of macabre ways. There are mothers that zestily eat their young and mothers that drink their young's blood. Mothers that pit one young against the other in a fight to the death and mothers that raise one set of their babies on the flesh of their siblings.

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Both the Chicago Tribune and the Sun-Times had stories about a recent study that showed women can judge, with a surprising degree of accuracy, which men would make better long-term or short-term partners just by looking at men's faces.

According to the Tribune story, titled "Daddy material? It takes just 1 look":

"Our data suggest that women are picking up on facial cues that may be related to paternal qualities," said the lead author of the paper, James Roney of the University of California, Santa Barbara. "The more they perceived the men as liking kids, the more likely they could see having a long-term relationship."

According to the Sun-Times tory, titled "Like babies? Women can see it on your face":

"They were surprisingly accurate in judging men's interest in infants, as well as their masculinity," said University of Chicago behavioral biologist Dario Maestripieri, a co-author of the study.

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"In Men, 'Trigger-Happy' May Be a Hormonal Impulse" is a New York Times story about a study that found that handling guns appears to stir a hormonal reaction in men. "Fifteen minutes later, the psychologists measured saliva testosterone again and found that the levels had spiked in men who had handled the gun but had stayed steady in those working with the board game," according to the story.

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On a funny note, a friend sent me a link to this story about, of all things, cleavage.

"Not all men are alike, so not all men look in the same way. Through close examination, I've uncovered five distinct ways in which men look at cleavage, or, as the woman in the next cubicle calls them, 'puppies on parade'," writes RedEye columnist Jimmy Greenfield in his column, titled "We're gonna look if you show cleavage". (Note: It doesn't look like Redeye keeps archives online, so if you wait to read this one, you may have to go to the Google cache.)