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They use more emotional language, which has an effect on girls' worldview

Most mothers would tell you they speak to all their children the same way. A new study suggests they might be deceived. In a study published yesterday in The British Journal of Developmental Psychology, authors Ana Aznar and Harriet Tenenbaum found that mothers are more likely to use emotional words and emotional content when speaking with their 4-year-old daughters than with their 4-year-old sons.

What’s more, since mothers tend to use more emotion-laden language than fathers do, they are often unknowingly perpetuating gender stereotypes in their children. On the plus side, though, it may be why women tend to have a higher emotional intelligence than men.

“We know…that children imitate same-gendered models [i.e. girls imitate moms and boys imitate dads] more than different-gendered models,” says Tenenbaum, associate professor of psychology at the University of Surrey, in an interview with TIME. “So they are taught that emotions are more acceptable for women than for men.” (Insert emotionally-unavailable husband/father/boyfriend joke here.)

Tenenbaum points out that learning emotional intelligence is incredibly important for children in terms of school success, getting along with teachers and having good peer relations. “[Past studies have shown that] children who are better able to show emotions in kindergarten did better in the 4th grade than kids who didn’t,” she says. Moreover, “children who use more emotional words are more popular in nursery school. People would rather be around someone who can understand and interpret emotions.” And kids who understand emotions better tend to have higher performance in school even after controlling for intelligence, she notes.

In this new study, researchers videotaped 65 Spanish mothers and fathers along with their 4-year-old and 6-year-old children during a storytelling task and then during a conversation about a past experience. The subjects lived in middle-to-upper-class neighborhoods. On the first visit, the mother or the father and the child were taped in conversation. Within a week, the other parent and the child came in and talked about a similar subject. The videotaped conversations were transcribed and emotion words like “happy,” “sad,” “angry,” “love,” “concern,” and “fear,” were singled out.

Mothers used a higher proportion of emotional words than fathers did with both 4 and 6-year olds, which is consistent with studies performed in the U.S. But they were particularly expressive with their 4-year old daughters. “American mothers and fathers do similar things in enforcing emotions,” says Tenenbaum. The theory is that mothers may be more comfortable talking about their emotions than fathers. Children might therefore think it is more appropriate for girls to talk about feelings. In fact, daughters were more likely than sons to speak about their emotions with their fathers when talking about past experiences. And during these reminiscing conversations, fathers used more emotion-laden words with their 4-year-old daughters than with their 4-year-old sons.

Aznar and Tenenbaum did a few things in this study that made it different from previous ones. They added fathers to the equation, when most studies looking at emotions have focused only on mothers, and they examined Spanish families, which hadn’t been looked at before, because they wanted to see how patterns played out across different cultures.

And most importantly, the authors tested the children to determine their baseline emotional comprehension. They quizzed them on what people in various situations might be feeling and found that emotional understanding was the same for 4-year-old boys and girls. Thus, emotional intelligence is not an innate quality of females. Since the pretest didn’t show that 4-year-old girls understand emotions any better than boys, the fact that parents talk in more emotional terms to daughters over sons can’t be explained away by saying parents do this because they believe girls understand emotions better. “We didn’t find any difference in the children’s understanding of emotions in the pretest,” says Tenenbaum.

Tenenbaum was surprised that mothers and fathers continue to perpetuate the stereotypes. “Most parents say they want boys to be more expressive, but don’t know [they] are speaking differently to them,” she says.

Parents should try to teach boys about emotion as much as possible, says Tenenbaum, and use emotion-laden language with both sons and daughters. “We are beyond the point in society where boys are taught never to express emotions,” she says. “We need to model for them how to appropriately express emotions. These are learned stereotypes and we are reinforcing them as a society.”

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Watch enough old movies and you'd think every journalist was an over-the-top, cigar-chomping chatterbox. Not so, says veteran reporter Eleanor Clift. Here, she explains how she went from being afraid to raise her hand at a PTA meeting to arguing her views on national TV

This article originally appeared on RealSimple.com.

My parents came to America from the tiny island of Föhr in the North Sea off the coast of Germany and Denmark. My father worked as a clerk in New York City delicatessen stores and by the time my two older brothers and I were born, he had his own store. He dealt with the customers while my mother worked in the kitchen, making rice pudding, custards and potato salad. Their work ethic was incredible. And they never sought applause or praise for it.

To the contrary, they poked fun at other people—especially those they perceived as bragging or showing off. I adopted their cultural aversion to drawing attention to oneself, and throughout my early school years, I spoke when called upon but rarely volunteered to speak.

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That worked until one day in fifth grade when I needed to stand in front of the class and summarize a news article. In anticipation of this event, I awoke feeling nauseous—what my mother called a “nervous stomach.” I imagined all sorts of things that could go wrong: I would forget my place, my classmates would laugh at me for some real or imagined transgression. Nothing catastrophic happened. But I can still recite the start of that speech. I spoke in a complete monotone, every bit of spontaneity squeezed out of my delivery.

This experience didn’t cure my fear of public speaking. Over the years to come, I dreaded everything from raising my hand in a classroom as a student to speaking out on behalf of my own children at a PTA meeting. Even at press conferences that I attended as part of my job as a magazine reporter, I hung back and watched as other journalists shouted questions.

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The only thing worse was speaking before an audience of the people who knew me best, like my family or close friends. I imagined they would see right through me if I acted too full of myself (my mother’s words).

When I was in my early thirties, the magazine I worked for began experimenting with storytelling on television. Correspondents would go out with a film crew and narrate their stories, a new experience for reporters accustomed to working with a pad and pencil. Reading these scripts aloud was hugely difficult for me. I was told my delivery was too-sing-songy. Speaking assertively would have meant challenging those elemental fears about stepping on stage and owning my persona.

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I couldn’t do it alone. So I signed up for an adult education course, called “How to face an audience without taking a tranquilizer.” The instructor, Sandy Linver, was a pioneer in what was then a new field of communication development. She had founded an organization called the Speakeasy, which was as much group therapy as speech coaching. When we gathered, each member would give a talk and the others would gently offer a critique. The talks were videotaped, and we could see ourselves as others saw us. What I saw surprised me: a woman with long blond hair pulled back into a ponytail—perfect for the park, but not the podium. “Eleanor, earth mothers are out,” said Sandy, urging me to cut my hair, seeing it as a metaphor. I did, and it was a transformative experience. When I showed up with shoulder-length hair to my next class, everyone clapped. I realized I didn’t have to be stuck in an outdated image. I could free myself to command the spotlight.

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The Speakeasy course taught me that the key to public speaking was just doing it, over and over again, and learning to understand the anxious feelings that come with it, and how they dissipate. I learned that a few deep breaths can work wonders, as can mentally repeating a comforting thought or a childhood prayer. I do not strive to be free of all stress when making a public presentation, though, because anxiety can be positive, it pushes me to excel as long as it’s kept in check. That’s the balance to seek.

Even once I was able to speak in small groups, though, I never expected I’d end up talking before millions of people on TV. That came as a surprise—one of many on March 30, 1981. I was in the small pool of reporters accompanying President Reagan to the Hilton Hotel in Washington, D.C, where he was to give a speech. That day, he and his press secretary James Brady were shot. I was invited to appear that evening on a news program on PBS to recount the tragic events. As I sat in the studio fighting my anxiety, suddenly the image of the gravely wounded Jim Brady lying on the sidewalk and the awareness of how we almost lost the president jolted me. How could I think about my own minor fears after what I had witnessed? This wasn’t about me. That simple revelation eased my stage fright that night, and has continued to help calm me in many situations to this day. It’s not about me; it’s about the information that I wish to impart, or (in other settings) the argument that I want to make.

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I’m still not immune to the fear, even all these years later. Those early feelings of terror still surface with regularity. And there’s still always that moment when I wonder if what I have to say is relevant to the audience, but I have learned that people are forgiving, they’re not expecting perfection. But now that rush of anxiety is replaced with a sense of confidence that I can do this. And when it goes well, there is an almost physical high that comes with conquering my fears.

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When it comes to Kim Kardashian's butt, the medium is the message

Late Tuesday night, Kim Kardashian’s butt announced it would “break the Internet” when it appeared on the cover of Paper magazine. But what does “breaking the Internet” even mean? Is the Internet like a Gameboy that can break if someone sits on it by accident?

Obviously, Kim isn’t the first person to claim to “break the Internet.” In September Taylor Swift “broke the Internet” when she wore a T-shirt saying “no it’s Becky,” a super-meta reference to a Tumblr post where a user insisted that a picture of young Taylor was, in fact, someone named Becky. Beyoncé’s surprise album “broke the Internet” when she secretly released it last year. Alex from Target “broke the Internet” just by looking cute at work. Even Obama’s sensationally tan suit was almost able (but not quite) to “break the Internet,” according to Shape magazine.

Apparently, the Internet is about as durable as an 87-year-old hip.

And when it comes to Internet buzz, Kim Kardashian is Shiva the Destroyer — she has created a fame engine so big, she can dominate Twitter by flashing her nether cleavage (which, by the way, everyone has already seen.) But the most interesting circle on the Kim Kardashian cover isn’t her glistening derriere — it’s the tiny zero in $10, which is what that magazine costs. Paper magazine is just what it says it is: a magazine made of paper, and it costs money to buy it. That Kim Kardashian can “break the Internet” with a print magazine cover (as opposed to, say, an Instagram) is perhaps the biggest coup of all.

Paper Magazine is a small but prestigious art and fashion publication with an edgy bent. So while her Vogue cover with Kanye helped legitimize Kardashian with the fashion set, Paper is a better print venue for her to bare it all in a non-pornographic way. It’s prestigious in an artsy way, but not too prestigious to demure from the full-butt experience. Plus, print is always unexpected, and Kim loves the unexpected–remember her divorce from Kris Humphries?

It’s reminiscent of Benedict Cumberbatch’s recent old-fashioned newspaper engagement announcement, which immediately went viral. Most of the fascination was the news that Sherlock was off the market, but there was the added shock that the announcement wasn’t made on Twitter or Instagram, but instead appeared on a piece of pulpy grey newsprint in The Times of London. “It’s a kind of traditional thing to do,” Cumberbatch told People magazine. “I wanted to have some control over the message.”

Obviously, if the Internet does actually break, a paper magazine is probably not going to be what breaks it. Google Chairman Eric Schmidt said in October that surveillance programs like the NSA are “going to end up breaking the Internet,” because foreign governments won’t trust the United States not to snoop on their online activities. And according to The Guardian, sharks could “break the Internet” by nibbling at underwater cables.

Those events might change internet. But in the context of viral media content, “breaking the Internet” means engineering one story to dominate Facebook and Twitter at the expense of more newsworthy things. (Like, for example, the fact that humans have landed a probe on a comet for a first time in history.) So perhaps a more accurate term would be “hijacking the Internet,” since really these stories seem to be manipulating online fervor rather than shutting the whole thing down.

Sometimes people “break the Internet” by accident, which was the case for Alex from Target, the baby-faced Target checkout boy whose photo when viral after he was photographed by a teenage girl (and who is reportedly kind of freaked out by his internet fame.) Another example of accidental internet takeover is PR director Justine Sacco, whose offensive AIDS tweet went immediately viral and cost her her job.

But for celebrities, Internet destruction more often a calculated PR maneuver, designed to maximize social media hype and make themselves — or their projects — the center of attention. That’s what happened with Beyoncé last year — her self-titled album dropped the night of Dec. 12, 2013 with no fanfare or PR announcement, and by the next day she dominated Twitter, Facebook and iTunes. And this month, Taylor Swift’s entire rollout of her album 1989 has been calculated to maximize social media buzz, from dropping the first single (“Shake It Off”) through a Yahoo! livestream event to removing her entire catalogue from Spotify. Add her new Tumblr presence and her surprisingly thoughtful interaction with fans, and you’ve got an Internet tornado.

Kim Kardashian and the editors of Paper weren’t quite as strategic as Swift, but they do get points for irony. After all, the web helped eclipse print partially because of the popularity of bare butts online, so if this magazine cover were really able to break the internet, it’d be sweet revenge for paper and ink.

Read Next: Kim Kardashian’s Butt Is an Empty Promise

Almost 20,000 people petitioned the company to stop

Old Navy is under fire for its double standards when it comes to plus size clothing prices. While men pay the same price for regular and larger sizes, women get charged up to $12 to $15 more for plus sized items.

Almost 20,000 people have signed a petition asking Old Navy to change its practices. Renee Posey, who started the Change.org petition, notes that while she was “fine paying the extra money as a plus-sized woman, because, you know, more fabric equals higher cost of manufacture,” she was alarmed that the same standards didn’t apply to men, inciting that “Old Navy is participating in both sexism and sizeism, directed only at women.”

Old Navy’s explanation? A spokesperson for Gap Inc., the retailer’s parent company, issued a statement to TIME (among other outlets):

Old Navy is proud to offer styles and apparel designed specifically for the plus size customer. For women, styles are not just larger sizes of other women’s items, they are created by a team of designers who are experts in creating the most flattering and on-trend plus styles, which includes curve-enhancing and curve-flattering elements such as four-way stretch materials and contoured waistbands, which most men’s garments do not include. This higher price point reflects the selection of unique fabrics and design elements.

So more detail equals more money.

Spokesperson Debbie Felix didn’t respond to questions about Posey’s rebuttal about why the extra cost doesn’t apply to regular women’s clothing that includes the same fabrics and “figure-enhancing elements.”

A look at Old Navy’s petite section shows that the retailer charges the same amount for its smaller sizes as it does its “regular” sizes.

[BuzzFeed]

She mooned everyone

After debuting in her sex tape, periodically gracing her Instagram and making a brief appearance in GQ, Kim Kardashian’s butt’s latest showing is the cover of Paper magazine. She’s going full-moon, above the headline “Break the Internet: Kim Kardashian”

The photos were shot by famed French photographer Jean-Paul Goude, who also used Kardashian’s recognizable derriere to recreate his iconic “Champagne Incident” image for another safe-for-work version of the cover.

She posted the original image on her Instagram here.

Of course, whenever Kim Kardashian or her butt do anything, it creates a massive Internet controversy. Glee actress Naya Rivera allegedly commented on Kardashian’s Instagram, “I normally don’t… but you’re someone’s mother.”

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But Kim herself tweeted about her champagne balancing act:

Just when everyone thought they’d already seen Kim Kardashian’s butt a million times, oops, there it is.

Read more: Kim Kardashian Is Publishing a Book of Selfies

Read next: Kim Kardashian’s Butt Is an Empty Promise

If you hear that word one more time, you will definitely cringe. You may exhale pointedly. And you might even seek out the nearest the pair of chopsticks and thrust them through your own eardrums like straws through plastic lids. What word is this? You tell us.

For TIME’s fourth annual word banishment poll, we’re asking readers to vote another word off the island, following previous castoffs OMG, YOLO and twerk. Cast your vote, encourage your friends to share their curmudgeonly angst and we’ll announce the results next week on Nov. 19.

If you need help deciding (or a little background on the words), see our blurbs below the poll, in which we’ve channeled the type of person who would like to see each nominee launched into the deepest, darkest, most hopeless eternity from whence there is no salvation nor return.

bae: Yes, this term of endearment has been around for years, but suddenly it’s everywhere. You can’t turn around without encountering someone’s bae or some bae meal or some bae bae. The cool factor is being smothered. It’s time to start using something Chick-Fil-A managers have never heard of.

basic: You get it. Girls need a word for other girls who name-drop D-listers in their fake Louboutins, going around thinking they’re a Carrie, even though they’re really a Miranda — if Miranda had a less remarkable hair color and worked at TJ Maxx. But basic has become basic. Bad bitches can do better.

bossy: You are leaning in all over the place. If Sheryl wants a word banned, then we best get banning.

disrupt: Silicon Valley types may be changing sleepy industries, but this word is more worn out than startup names that sound and look like six-year-olds came up with them. You just might strangle the next “disrupt0r” you meet with his hoodie drawstrings.

feminist: You have nothing against feminism itself, but when did it become a thing that every celebrity had to state their position on whether this word applies to them, like some politician declaring a party? Let’s stick to the issues and quit throwing this label around like ticker tape at a Susan B. Anthony parade.

I can’t even: … finish a sentence, apparently. Nobody is this speechless.

influencer: This kind of business jargon makes you want to pivot yourself into a gorge. Stop throwing trumped up labels on people with a bunch of Twitter followers or five friends who might sign up for something if they do.

kale: You haven’t been so tired of having a single thing talked about and trumpeted and pushed in your face since people started signing up for Twitter. You even saw kids selling dried kale chips on the street the other day instead of running a lemonade stand. Kale chips, people! This is America!

literally: You continue to hate it when people use literally to mean figuratively, even if the word just won’t be separated from that usage. The least you can do is cast a vote against everyone who has ever “literally” lost their mind, because they are metaphorically driving you bananas.

om nom nom nom: If people could stop posting pictures of their brunches like their fancy toast slices were newborn babies, then maybe you would be spared this overdone onomatopoeia. You get it. Food is delicious. Restaurants serve bacon. Moving on.

obvi: You hate this particular unnecessary, cloying word-shortening about as much as you hate perf, whatevs, adorbs, natch, totes and amaze (when used in place of amazing). If truncation is cool, then you’d like to buy a ticket to the hottest place on earth, please.

said no one ever: “A joke like this stays fresh no matter how many times you hear it,” said no one ever.

sorry not sorry: #sorrynotsorryyoureoverthisnonapology

turnt: Parents in Middle America may still be struggling to understand what this word means, but everybody else knows all too well — including writers at SNL, who portrayed the state of being turnt as a remedy to an unsatisfying sex life. It’s time for turnt to turn down.

yaaasssss: Nooooooooo mmooooorrrreeeeee. If only for poor Lady Gaga’s sake.

This is an edition of Wednesday Words, a feature on language. For the previous post, click here.