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Nutrition Plate Unveiled to Replace the Food Pyramid

June 2, 2011 by Leave a Comment

The new design was conceived as a crucial part of Mrs. Obama’s campaign against obesity, by reminding consumers about the basics of a healthy diet.

The plate is split into four sections, for fruit, vegetables, grains and protein. A smaller circle sits beside it for dairy.

Mrs. Obama, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack and Surgeon General Regina Benjamin unveiled the new healthy eating icon at a press conference in Washington.

Officials said they planned to use the plate in a campaign to communicate essential dietary guidelines to consumers, emphasizing one message at a time for best effect.

The first part of the campaign will encourage people to make half their plate fruit and vegetables. Later phases of the campaign will instruct consumers to avoid oversize portions, enjoy their food but eat less of it and to drink water instead of sugary drinks.

Nutritionists often criticized the food pyramid, which was first released in 1992, for being either misleading or hard to understand. They gave the plate cautious praise.

“It’s better than the pyramid but that’s not saying a lot,” said Marion Nestle, a professor of nutrition at New York University.

She praised the plate for being generally easy to understand, But she said that labeling a large section of the plate “protein” was confusing and unneccesary, since grains and dairy also are important sources of protein and most Americans get far more protein than they need.

But she said the emphasis on fruits and vegetables was a significant step.

“Americans aren’t used to eating this way so this is a big change,” Ms. Nestle said.

The plate was created by the Department of Agriculture with input from the first lady’s anti-obesity team and federal health officials. The agriculture department said that it conducted focus groups with about 4,500 people, including children, as they developed the new icon. Developing the icon and creating a website and other educational materials to go along with it cost about $2 million. That money will also help pay for an educational campaign centered on the plate icon over the next year, officials said.

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The Boss: A Venture Born in the Kitchen

May 29, 2011 by Leave a Comment

The five of us — I am the youngest — grew up in a neighborhood with Camelback Mountain almost in our backyard. My dad developed a line of healthy dinners for Con-Agra Foods and my mother worked at a local department store.

Toward the end of high school, my parents moved to Nebraska. I stayed and went to Arizona State University, where I majored in communications and minored in finance. By the time I graduated from Arizona State, in 1989, the job market had slowed down so I bought airline tickets to Los Angeles, Chicago and New York and started knocking on doors.

After three weeks on the road and 90 interviews, I took a job in Manhattan at Time Inc.’s department that managed placement of magazines with major airlines. I met my husband, Theo, who was attending New York University School of Law and hoping to work with high-tech companies after graduation. Three years later, I moved to CNN as an advertising sales trainee.

Theo and I moved to San Francisco together in 1994, and he began his career as a business and technology lawyer and I started to look for my next challenge. I heard about 2Market, a joint venture of Apple and AOL that was building one of the first computer-based shopping services. I was hired as their only salesperson, introducing retailers to the world of e-commerce.

Within a year, we had signed up many well-known retailers and were acquired by AOL. I then worked as vice president for AOL’s e-commerce and shopping partnerships — commuting across country (and virtually living on United Airlines) between San Francisco and Virginia, where AOL had its headquarters.

After giving birth to my second child, in 2001, it was time for a break, time to get in shape and build a healthier lifestyle. Step 1 was to get all the junk food out of the house, including my own worst habit, Diet Coke. So I cleaned out the refrigerator and replaced all the soda and juice with water. But Theo and the kids found plain water boring. And the truth is I did, too.

I searched for healthier drinks in the grocery stores, but could find nothing we liked. We tried a few flavored waters, but we didn’t like the lingering taste of diet sweeteners.

So I started slicing fresh fruits into pitchers of water, and everyone in my family liked that. My children’s friends even started to ask for it when they came over. One day, another parent called to ask where I bought that raspberry water her child had been talking about. I laughed, but then asked myself, “Why can’t stores sell something this simple?”

In 2004, I decided to turn some of my fruit-flavored waters into a business. I took $50,000 of our savings and plunged into learning the details of the beverage industry. Two weeks later, I realized that I was pregnant with our fourth child. I asked Theo to help me out. Soon we were building the business together.

At first, we sold Hint out of our Jeep and delivered the cases ourselves. In June 2005, we took samples to the Fancy Food Show in New York City, and buyers from Whole Foods ordered our line of 10 flavors. Things took off from there, and we now have offices in San Francisco and New York and sell to major grocers and online.

We have continued to build relationships with our retailers because shelf space is so crucial to our business. But nothing is more important than our relationship with our customers, which is why one of us answers most e-mails from consumers, and that is still my favorite part of the job.

As told to Elizabeth Olson.

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DealBook: The Big Board Tunes Out Its Own Rules

April 26, 2011 by Leave a Comment

The New York Stock Exchange.Jin Lee/Bloomberg NewsThe New York Stock Exchange.

The New York Stock Exchange, that bastion and soundstage of capitalism, has always held itself up as a model of good corporate governance. It has strict governance rules for companies whose shares trade on its exchange.

Even through years of weathering Enron and other corporate scandals, not to mention the outcry over the pay package for its own former chief executive, Richard A. Grasso, the exchange has marketed a Big Board listing as a Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval.

So it has been somewhat surprising to watch the board of the exchange’s parent company as it defends its planned merger with Deutsche Börse and fights off a rival bid from the Nasdaq OMX Group and IntercontinentalExchange, or ICE.

Without so much as having a brief meeting or discussion with Nasdaq and ICE on their bid — which offered over 13 percent more than Deutsche Börse’s bid — the board of NYSE Euronext declared the offer “clearly not in the best interests of our shareholders.”

How could the board determine that without even having a conversation?

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Rob Rutschow, an analyst at the Hong Kong-based CLSA brokerage firm, put it best: “It is hard to ignore a much higher value per share offered by Nasdaq and ICE, but NYSE’s management found a way to do it.”

Then, in the face of a proposal for shareholders to hold an extraordinary meeting to compel the NYSE Euronext board to consider the rival bid — a right that the shareholders don’t have without the consent of the board — the directors turned them down.

Corporate governance experts are dismayed. John Biggs, a director of Boeing and the former chief of TIAA-CREF who now teaches corporate governance at New York University, says that given the Big Board’s role as a model for others, it is indefensible for the company not to engage in merger talks.

“Why is the NYSE taking this position and being unwilling to talk? On the face of it, ‘best practice’ would be to have a meeting,” he said. “There may be reasons not to talk — but I haven’t heard them.”

In truth, the NYSE has articulated a series of reasons it prefers its deal with Deutsche Börse, all of which seem somewhat reasonable. Its biggest reason is that a deal with Nasdaq and ICE, it says, faces enormous regulatory challenges and is complicated by the fact that NYSE would be split up by the buyers, which is, of course, accurate.

But that doesn’t mean that the board of NYSE shouldn’t be meeting with potential buyers in hopes of squeezing an even better offer from them. And it seems even stranger to see the board prevent its own shareholders from considering the offer, given its propensity toward pushing companies on the exchange to be more open.

Here’s the NYSE, in its own words, when it comes to listed companies: “Good business practice is frequently the controlling factor in the determination of management to submit a matter to shareholders for approval even though neither the law nor the company’s charter makes such approvals necessary. The exchange encourages this growth in corporate democracy.”

And yet, when it comes to its own shareholder democracy, well, the NYSE is not as quick to take its own advice.

The NYSE’s reason for not having a special meeting? “A 10 percent standard for calling special meetings as favored by the proponent would present a real risk of significant cost, management distraction and diversion of management and financial resources to address a possibly unlimited number of special meetings.”

Really? That’s the rationale? It’s not as if the company is being bid on every day.

Institutional Shareholder Services, the proxy advisory service, wrote: “The inability to call a special meeting and the resulting insulation of management could adversely affect corporate performance and shareholder returns.”

In fairness, people close to the NYSE say the bid by Nasdaq is so inadequate — the price is too low and the antitrust challenges so high with little in the way of protection for its shareholders should a deal fail to get done — that it would be a disservice to NYSE shareholder’s to engage in any form of talks. If the bid were higher or included some greater sense of certainty, it would at least be worth the conversation.

And some have cynically suggested that Nasdaq and ICE are not really interested in a deal with the NYSE. The bid, they say, is just an effort to force Deutsche Börse to pay more or an opportunity for Nasdaq to get a peek at its biggest rival’s confidential numbers. Invoking an old Wall Street saw, one executive working for NYSE described Nasdaq’s bid as “a chance to see the centerfold without having to pay for the magazine.”

All that may be true — and the offer from Deutche Börse may ultimately be the better deal — but for a company that is supposed to be the example to every other, the right “process” may be as important as the outcome.

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Hotels Spruce Up Their Executive Lounges

April 25, 2011 by Leave a Comment

“The time is appropriate,” said Bjorn Hanson, dean of the Preston Robert Tisch Center for Hospitality, Tourism and Sports Management at New York University. Upgrades were a priority from 2005 to 2007, but since then, many hotels have deferred investments, Mr. Hanson said. “Frankly, some of these facilities need to be refurbished and redesigned.”

Investing in lounges is smart, he said, because they attract travelers who are less cost-conscious. Lounges are generally areas set aside for premium customers to work and relax, far from the hotel’s lobby.

Sheraton Hotels Resorts and the owners of its hotels are spending about $108 million to upgrade 120 club lounges around the world, said Hoyt H. Harper, global brand leader. Before the redesign, layouts were not well planned, televisions were outdated and Wi-Fi not widely available, he said. Most new lounges will offer better views, upgraded services like manager’s receptions, wider food and beverage choices, free Wi-Fi, high-quality color printers, flat-screen televisions, and even game tables.

The lounges will be open seven days a week and in some cases, 24 hours a day. “We found that our guests like having the lounge open on the weekend and into the night as well,” Mr. Harper said.

Erin Hoover, vice president for global brand design for Sheraton and Westin, said Sheraton was making design a priority in its lounges. ”We’re creating spaces that are flexible, so business travelers can move between different zones for different activities,” Ms. Hoover said. “It’s very similar to how you set up your home.”

The design will be consistent, but layouts, colors and art will differ regionally. The Sheraton TriBeCa in New York City, for instance, has an outdoor terrace with a 180-degree view of downtown Manhattan and a small, intimate dining area. “It feels like I’m at my friend’s kitchen,” Ms. Hoover said. In Edinburgh, textiles, fabrics, wood and books create a cozy “almost library-like” feel to the media wall, she said.

Henry H. Harteveldt, travel industry analyst for Forrester Research, said he had seen “some lounges with all the ambiance of a dentist’s waiting room.” He added, “Design is very, very important, and it is much more integrated into daily life nowadays.” But, he said, lounges ideally combine “the aesthetic with the practical.”

J.W. Marriott Hotels is updating or planning new executive lounges for many of its properties. Some will have “vanishing bars,” custom furniture by day that opens in the evening for cocktails, said Mitzi Gaskins, vice president and global brand manager. Other lounges may be larger, perhaps with private meeting rooms within them, as in Asia, where they are often popular gathering places. Dining and beverage offerings will focus on local and organic foods. And all will have a concierge, she said.

Hilton Hotels Resorts is planning executive lounge improvements in many of its properties, including those in development, said Dave Horton, global head of the Hilton brand. “It’s a key focus.” The company was not ready to release details, but Mr. Horton said the lounges would use design, technology, food and beverages “to create an environment where our guests can connect with others, relax or be productive while traveling.”

At Fairmont Hotels Resorts, there are plans to upgrade that could include things like lights that dim to change the mood to help travelers relax, said Clarence McLeod, corporate director of Fairmont Gold, the brand’s premium level. Other ideas include libraries with e-readers, and sound rooms with high-end equipment to listen to music. About 10 lounges already offer iPads, he said. The brand also plans to personalize arrivals and service, based on guests’ interests.

“It’s about giving guests options,” said Alan Benjamin, president of Benjamin West, a company that supplies interior furnishings to major hotel brands and independent hotels internationally. The redesign of lounges is similar to what happened with hotel lobbies, which have been transformed into work and social areas.

Mr. Benjamin said business travelers worked traditionally in their rooms, but now more favor communal areas. Lounges typically offer individual seating “for people who want to cocoon themselves,” he said, as well as large communal tables. Lounges are ideal for travelers who do not want to be secluded in their rooms, but who seek more privacy than possible in the lobby, he said.

Deborah Lloyd Forrest, principal of ForrestPerkins, an international architecture and design firm specializing in luxury hotels and resorts, said the first lounges “were designed to create a hotel within a hotel, a place of refuge for elite quests.”

Stephen Perkins, also a principal at ForrestPerkins, said, that “lounges became a distillation of the brand, a way to impart value through décor, art, acoustics, to encourage loyalty in its most important guests.”

Travel experts said it was a way for brands to stay competitive by differentiating themselves from others.

Joseph A. McInerney, chief executive of the American Hotel and Lodging Association, a hotel industry trade group, said lounges evolved from designated executive floors, which often had their own elevators or keys, “to make regular business travelers feel special.” The industry followed the airlines, which provided different amenities depending on class of service.

“When you have a long day, it’s nice not to have to go downstairs,” said Rick LeBlanc, an executive from the Toronto area. “It’s more relaxing to just go to the lounge and talk to fellow business travelers.”

Mr. LeBlanc, who is a frequent guest at many of Sheraton’s executive club lounges, said he had already noticed the greater food diversity, improved décor and service at some. “They know my name. They know what I like to drink,” he said. “There’s just an energy that resonates with global travelers. It’s a major uplift.”

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As Generics Near, Makers Tweak Erectile Drugs

April 14, 2011 by Leave a Comment

Levitra, another erectile dysfunction drug, is now sold as a dissolvable tablet in nine European countries and may come to American pharmacies as soon as this month under the name Staxyn. That new form of the drug, which fizzes and dissolves in seconds, is marketed in a pocket-size, midnight-black box for men who prefer to take it discreetly, without water.

The third drug for erectile dysfunction to reach the market, Cialis, now eight years old, is racing ahead of the others because of two ideas that have proven extremely popular: an everyday pill and a 36-hour “weekender.” Cialis is projected to become the top-selling of the three drugs in the world this year, passing Viagra.

The market for drugs to correct erectile dysfunction has passed $5 billion a year from sales to tens of millions of men. And it is increasingly being driven by novel applications to compete with the lower-priced generics on the horizon.

“ ‘Gimmick’ is a strong word, but all of this is designed to create new brand identities,” Dr. Joseph P. Alukal, an assistant professor and director of reproductive health at the New York University School of Medicine, said. “A newer product, less expensive, and a new form of taking it — all that might convince more people to try it.”

Research is also under way in Brazil on a faster-acting form of the drugs, which increase blood flow by relaxing smooth muscle cells. While the existing pills enter the bloodstream indirectly by way of the stomach, intestines and liver, this form would enter more directly, dissolving in a capillary-rich space under the tongue and increasing the blood flow within 10 or 15 minutes. The research in Brazil involves generic Viagra, but Pfizer says it is not sponsoring the work.

The Mexican experiment with Viagra Jet will show whether the chewable form of the drug has promise in other countries, particularly developing markets, Susan O’Connor, Pfizer’s vice president of global commercial development, said in an interview. Studies showed most Mexican men who used Viagra ground it up to make it easier to swallow or in the belief it would start acting faster.

In explaining why the drug is being test-marketed in Mexico, Ms. O’Connor cited “patient preference, found in market research.” Mexico is the biggest market for Viagra in the developing world, with about $55 million in sales last year. At this point, Pfizer does not have plans to bring Viagra Jet to the United States, she said.

In America, Pfizer is battling to keep low-price generic competition off the shelves a year from now, when the drug’s patent expires. The generic pills would cost only a fraction of the $10 or more that each pill now costs.

Bayer, meanwhile, has introduced the dissolvable form of its Levitra drug in Austria, France, Hungary, Germany, Spain, Poland, Sweden, Denmark and Britain, where it went on sale in late March. The drug is called Levitra ODT, for orodispersible tablets. It comes in a thin black package the size of a half-dozen stacked credit cards, with four pills on a card that slides out.

“It’s pocket-friendly, discreet and gives the product a playful edge over its competitors,” Thomas Proske, global brand manager for Levitra at Bayer Healthcare, said in a statement.

The same pill was approved in the United States last June under the brand name Staxyn.

It will be available in pharmacies this month, according to Jess Macnaught, marketing executive with Burgopak Design and Packaging, the London company that designed the new black package. GlaxoSmithKline and Merck have licensed American rights from Bayer, but they declined to reveal when the drug would be introduced. Last year, they said Staxyn would reach the market in late 2010.

Worldwide sales of erectile dysfunction drugs grew 6.9 percent in 2010, to about $5 billion, and 4.7 percent in 2009, according to the industry data firm IMS Health.

Dr. Alukal of New York University said he thought Staxyn could be sold for a much lower price than what Levitra and other pills now cost, in part to compete with a generic Viagra. No price has been revealed.

“I guess it could be easier to ingest, so it could expand its market somewhat, but in the end the bigger issue would be cost,” Dr. Alukal said. He said the companies, for whom he does not consult, had talked about lower pricing, perhaps to under $10 a pill.

But for now, Pfizer, the company that started it all, is focusing its attention on protecting the pricing power and brand integrity of Viagra.

Patrick Ford, a former F.B.I. agent who leads the company’s security operations in the Americas, says Viagra is the most counterfeited product in the world. His agents pose as buyers, collect evidence and bring fraud cases to prosecutors, and he says fake Viagra may be unsafe. Pfizer and other pharmaceutical companies are working with Victoria Angelica Espinel, the government’s intellectual property enforcement coordinator, a position President Obama appointed her to in 2009.

Pfizer is also using its legal firepower against would-be generic competitors. Pfizer has two patents for Viagra, one for its chemical, expiring in 2012, and the other for its use against impotence, expiring in 2019. Pfizer sued Teva Pharmaceutical Industries, the biggest generic-drug company, in March 2010 under the “use” patent. The suit is pending in a Virginia federal court.

MacKay Jimeson, a Pfizer spokesman, said the company was confident it would keep the 2019 patent protection, but industry analysts disagree.

“ ‘Use’ patents are not highly probable of being upheld in court,” said C. Anthony Butler, a Barclays Capital pharmaceuticals analyst. “Most if not all analysts assume the expiry of the drug upon expiry of the composition of matter patent.”

The chemical patent expires on March 27, 2012. Pfizer may be able to extend it another six months, to September 2012, under a federal law called the Best Pharmaceuticals for Children Act. The law is meant to encourage drug companies to study children’s uses, often a difficult and unprofitable area.

In this case, what would be studied is not Viagra for children, but Revatio, a formulation of the same chemical, sildenafil, which is approved for pulmonary arterial hypertension, a rare and dangerous condition affecting hundreds of children in the United States. Mr. Jimeson said the company was working closely with the Food and Drug Administration to discuss the pediatric studies of Revatio and the potential for an extension on the chemical patent, which would also protect Viagra and its prices.

Many men, though, have waited years for a lower-priced Viagra and their wish may come true next year.

Other researchers are testing new uses for Viagra that Pfizer says it is not financing. Boston University is studying it with testosterone gel in men 40 to 70. Laboratório Teuto Brasileiro, in Brazil, where the patent expired last year, has filed a notice of intent to test it in a tablet that dissolves under the tongue and has an effect in 10 minutes or so. Pfizer owns 40 percent of the lab but says that it did not initiate the study.

Eli Lilly, meanwhile, says it has no plans to try chewable or dissolvable or any other forms of its Cialis tablets, and why should it? Cialis sales have steadily increased since it was introduced in 2003, to $1.7 billion last year, close to Viagra’s $1.9 billion. The health care investment house Leerink Swann estimates that Cialis sales will edge past Viagra in 2011 and far surpass the iconic blue pill in 2012.

Shawn Heffern, Lilly’s United States marketing director for Cialis, says, “I couldn’t be more happy.”

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When a Lawsuit Is Too Big

April 3, 2011 by Leave a Comment

Justice Antonin Scalia seems to think so, judging by his comments on Tuesday during the Supreme Court argument in the biggest employment discrimination class action in history.

“We must have a pretty bad judicial system,” he said, reflecting on what he had just heard from a lawyer for hundreds of thousands of women suing Wal-Mart over what they say was unfair treatment on pay and promotions. The lawyer had said that a trial judge could rely on statistical formulas rather than testimony and personnel records to decide how much money the company would have to pay each plaintiff if it lost.

“Is this really due process?” Justice Scalia asked.

In other words, does the impersonality of the suit threaten its ability to be fair to each plaintiff and to Wal-Mart, the country’s biggest private employer?

The mass production of justice through class actions can indeed test the limits of the role that courts play in society. But the enormous size of modern institutions, it has been argued, requires efficient, streamlined procedures like class actions to address their failures.

“We are in the domain of mass litigation in mass society, where the private lawsuit is a regulatory enterprise,” said Samuel Issacharoff, a law professor at New York University.

“You need to have mechanisms of enforcement that correspond to the scale of the economic activity.”

Suzette M. Malveaux, a law professor at Catholic University in Washington, agreed that class actions have an important role to play in many cases, particularly those involving fraud and discrimination.

“It’s a balancing act between efficiency and fairness,” she said.

The issue tends to divide lawyers and scholars along ideological lines.

Conservatives and business groups say class actions are a form of regulation through litigation and insert courts into matters better left to administrative bodies. Consumer and civil rights lawyers counter that without class-action treatment, grave but widely dispersed wrongs would never be addressed.

The day after the Wal-Mart argument, a prominent federal appeals court judge issued an opinion in a similar but smaller case, this one brought by about 500 women against Rolls-Royce.

How far class-action procedures “can be stretched is the issue in the gigantic class action against Wal-Mart now before the Supreme Court,” Judge Richard A. Posner of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit in Chicago wrote for a unanimous three-judge panel, ruling against class-action treatment.

“The present case is not as big a stretch,” he said, “but it is big enough.”

Judge Posner said he was concerned about the due process rights of so-called absent class members: women who would be bound by the result in the case even though they had not volunteered for it and had no right to opt out and sue on their own. And he added that something more than a “mechanical computation” was needed to decide who gets how much money should the women win. Rather, he said, the case would require “500 separate hearings.”

Perhaps the most counterintuitive wrinkle in the typical class action is that only a handful of named plaintiffs have agreed to be represented by the lawyers who brought the case. Yet all of the class members will be held to the results those lawyers achieve.

“Ordinarily, you enforce your own rights,” Professor Malveaux said. “Here, someone is representing you without your consent. We only allow that in exceptional circumstances.”

She added that the Wal-Mart case qualified for the exception. “The idea of every woman coming forward and challenging their store manager is really unlikely,” she said.

Richard Epstein, a law professor at New York University, disagreed, noting that the plaintiffs in the Wal-Mart case are suing over “decentralized personnel decisions” in thousands of stores.

“You want to wring your hands,” he said. “This case is so crazy.”

At the argument last week, some of the justices appeared sympathetic to the plaintiffs’ complaint but wary about the courts’ ability to handle so large a case.

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Bucks: Bribing Children to Spend Less on Tuition

March 27, 2011 by Leave a Comment

Bucks - Money Through the Ages

Zac Bissonnette is a senior at the University of Massachusetts and the author of “Debt-Free U.” In an article in the special section this week on Money Through the Ages, he offered advice for a student grappling with a choice of taking on student debt or starting at a community college.

One of the most common questions I get from parents is this: I agree with your message that student loans are evil and that my child won’t suffer by going to a public four-year college or starting at a community college.

But how can I convince my kid of that?

Here’s the problem: Your 17-year old is brain-damaged. Well, not really brain-damaged. But according to the pediatric neurologist Frances Jensen, the frontal lobes in adolescents are not yet fully connected. She told NPR: “It’s the part of the brain that says: ‘Is this a good idea? What is the consequence of this action?’ It’s not that they don’t have a frontal lobe. And they can use it. But they’re going to access it more slowly.”

In other words, adolescents are less equipped than adults to make a rational judgment about the consequences of borrowing $20,000, $30,000, $40,000. This is why teenagers aren’t allowed to buy cigarettes or alcohol, rent cars, or gamble.

But they sure can borrow $100,000 to pay for a women’s studies degree from New York University. I’ve written at great length about the consequences of student loan debt: a federal default rate of 20 percent and rising, constrained career options, the fact that student loans can’t be discharged in bankruptcy, etc. I’ve also written about the strong evidence that starting at a community college will not affect your child’s career or life prospects in any way. And then there’s the Princeton study that found that career earnings track with aptitude, not the brand of sheepskin.

But if your child doesn’t find these arguments compelling because of an underdeveloped frontal lobe (really the only reason anyone could ever disagree with me about anything), here’s a back-up plan: Offer your child a $1,000 (or whatever) gift card to Neiman Marcus (or Bath Body Works — which would be easily the most awesome place to spend $1,000) in exchange for avoiding student loan debt and going to a college that’s affordable. Twenty years from now, you will both look back on it as the best $1,000 you ever spent.

I know, I know. This is unlikely to get you a nomination for the Congressional Medal of Principled Parenting. But think of it as the financial equivalent of a light tap on your 2-year-old’s hand before he sticks it into an electrical socket. It doesn’t make you a bad parent, and it just may save your child’s financial life.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=6ba1d2cc6bf7012d01af3bb7baf7960d

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