Parents Starting Marital Therapy for Pre-schoolers

January 21, 2030—Mia and Pat Ternell were worried that their six-year-old daughter Annie wasn’t smiling very intensely. So the divorced couple enrolled their child in a special marital education class for preschoolers.

“Annie had a cute smile, but it just wasn’t wide enough, and we know that studies show weaker smiles mean a greater chance that she will divorce in middle and old age,” Mia Ternell said.

The Ternells are among a growing number of parents across the country who are trying to heighten their children’s chances to having happy marriages when they reach adulthood. Parents are responding to numerous studies that link childhood photos with happiness levels in later married life.

“I didn’t want her to suffer the fate that Mia and I did,” Pat Ternell said about his daughter. “Now that I look back at my childhood photos, I see that my smile was kind of crooked, which is probably why our marriage crumbled.”

Scientists believe that the quality of a person’s smile reflects his or her underlying emotional characteristics, and therefore their ability to keep a lasting, happy relationship. Children with half-hearted grins are found to have far more marital discord later on, studies show.

Psychologists have developed therapies designed to prevent future marital problems by helping children develop better smiles.

“We figure if we start working on their smiles at an early age,” said renowned family psychologist Mary G. Savor,  “each individual will be better able to grin and bear marriage no matter who they wed.”

Researchers Identify Annoying Gene

July 7, 2029—A variation in a gene that is active in the central nervous system is associated with increased risk for being an annoying person, according to an international study. The research adds to evidence that gene plays a key role in making a person a pain in the neck.

Jean Nome, Ph.D., associate professor of popularity health at Oxford University, helped direct the international study, which involved 34 research institutions. Dr. Nome and her U.S. and European colleagues found that people who have inherited the gene variant NYNG3 have a 15-20 percent increased risk of being exasperating and repugnant compared with people who do not have the variant.

The researchers examined data from eight studies involving genes and personality. These studies included more than 31,000 people ages 25 to 76, representing a broad range of personality types.

After analyzing more than 1.5 million regions of the human genome, the researchers found that the NYNG3 gene variant—previously associated with aggression, social ineptitude and offensiveness—also predicts the tendency to become simply unlikeable. Altogether, researchers found the gene variant in 20 percent of the people studied.

“This is a significant breakthrough, “Nome said in a press release. “Hopefully this will lead to treatments for such maladies as insufferable personality disorder and clinical creepiness.”

British Schools Told to Scrap Spelling Lessons

June 24, 2029—The British government has advised elementary schools to stop teaching any rules of spelling to students, arguing that there are too many exceptions.

A 110-page National Strategies document titled “Scrap Spelling” includes a plethora of advice for teachers working with young children, but says spelling is just not worth the effort anymore.

“For every English spelling rule one teaches, there is at least one exception, and often many,” the document states. “And children really no longer need to know how to spell, since all their writing is done on electronic devices that have spell check.”

British education leaders have been scaling back academic requirements for the last 20 years, starting with the 2009 decision to drop the “i before e, except after c” spelling rule from school instruction.  This newest step largely eliminates all forms of reading and writing in British elementary schools. The schools in 2022 eliminated basic reading from its curriculum, allowing students to simply download stories directly to their brains. They can also now use voice-to-text speech for writing assignments.