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ACUVUE launches a new campaign to inspire Gen Z to put down their phones and follow their vision

What will you create on your social media break? Share it at #MyVisionMySight.

ACUVUE launches a new campaign to inspire Gen Z to put down their phones and follow their vision
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If you’ve always lived in a world with social media, it can be tough to truly understand how it affects your life. One of the best ways to grasp its impact is to take a break to see what life is like without being tethered to your phone and distracted by a constant stream of notifications.

Knowing when to disconnect is becoming increasingly important as younger people are becoming aware of the adverse effects screen time can have on their eyes. According to Eyesafe Nielsen, adults are now spending 13-plus hours a day on their digital devices, a 35% increase from 2019.1. Many of us now spend more time staring at screens on a given day than we do sleeping which can impact our eye health.

Normally, you blink around 15 times per minute, however, focusing your eyes on computer screens or other digital displays have been shown to reduce your blink rate by up to 60%.2 Reduced blinking can destabilize your eyes’ tear film, causing dry, tired eyes and blurred vision.3

ACUVUEhas been encouraging people to take time off social media and use their newfound time to see their vision, whether that's becoming a makeup influencer, focusing on athletics or embracing their unique talents.

Upworthy caught up with influencer, YouTube star and contact lens wearer Amber Alexander to talk about how she balances her social media use. Recently, she took a social media break while visiting her sister.

“I was able to slow down time and take in each moment,” she told Upworthy. “Being on social media 24/7 always puts me in a very overwhelmed and anxious state of mind, so it was so refreshing to put my phone down and see life from a clearer perspective. Every moment felt more meaningful.”

“As soon as I put my phone away, I was able to really connect with my family and cherish our time together. I saw how my peace of mind improved when I took a break from social media,” she continued.

Alexander understands how social media can have a huge effect on her self-esteem and productivity.

“Scrolling through social media often leads people to compare their own lives, achievements, and physical appearance to people they see online,” she told Upworthy. “It is unrealistic and discouraging to see so many attractive, successful people online 24/7. Also, being on social media takes up so much time from our day that could be used socializing with real people, going outside, and working towards meaningful goals.”

ACUVUE is challenging young people to take social media breaks to pursue their purposes, visions, missions, and dreams through its Where Vision Meets Sight campaign. But the campaign from ACUVUE is about a lot more than just personal development. They’d like you to inspire others by sharing what you’ve done during your social media break by using #MyVisionMySight.

Get inspired and learn more on ACUVUE’s Where Vision Meets Sight page.



1COVID-19: Screen Time spikes to over 13 hours per day according to Eyesafe Nielsen estimates, published 3/28/20, https://eyesafe.com/covid-19-screen-time-spike-to-....

2Tsubota K, Nakamori K. Dry eyes and video display terminals. N Engl J Med. 1993;328(8):584. doi: 10.1056/NEJM199302253280817.

3Patel S, Henderson R, Bradley L, et al. Effect of visual display unit use on blink rate and tear stability. Optom Vis Sci 1991;68(11):888-892. doi: 10.1097/00006324-199111000-00010.

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Man jumps out of his car with a puppy in the most adorable red-light moment ever recorded

"I JUST WITNESSED THE PUREST THING EVER."

via Celina Romera / Flickr

When you see someone jump out of their car at a red light to talk with another motorist, usually it's bad news. Most of the time, it's the moment when road rage gets personal.

But 26-year-old Celina Romera caught video of probably one of the most adorable red-light interactions between motorists on December 15 in Tampa, Florida.

In the video, an unidentified man pops out of his car at a stoplight with a darling puppy in his hand. In the other car, a big German Shepherd pops his head out and the two dogs exchange kisses.

"I JUST WITNESSED THE PUREST THING EVER," Romera wrote on Facebook.

After the light changes, the man with the puppy gently walks back to the car. In the video Romera can be heard saying, "It's okay, man. Take your time."

One could imagine that the dogs were barking at each other before the video began.Then, the owner of the puppy thought it was okay for the two dogs to meet. The American Kennel Club says that barking between dogs is a pretty crude way to communicate.

However, it is part of a host of messages that dogs send to one another.

The job of a dog's owner is to determine if the dogs are ready to share a sniff or of one is fearful.

"The combination of barking, body language, and approach-avoidance behavior gives away the fearful dog's motivation, even to us relatively uneducated body-language readers," the Club says on its blog.

The original video Romera posted has been shared over 120,000 times.

The heartwarming video is a reminder that nothing can bring two strangers and millions of Facebook viewers together quite like dogs.


This article originally appeared on 12.16.19


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Family

Mom who saved pet goose from eagle while breastfeeding is a mascot for moms everywhere

"Just a day in the life."

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Hold on, Frankie! Mama's coming!

How do you explain motherhood in a nutshell? Thanks to Cait Oakley, who stopped a preying bald eagle from capturing her pet goose as she breastfed her daughter, we have it summed up in one gloriously hilarious TikTok.

The now viral video shows the family’s pet goose, Frankie, frantically squawking as it gets dragged off the porch by a bald eagle—likely another mom taking care of her own kiddos.

Wearing nothing but her husband’s boxers while holding on to her newborn, Willow, Oakley dashes out of the house and successfully comes to Frankie's rescue while yelling “hey, hey hey!”

The video’s caption revealed that the Oakleys had already lost three chickens due to hungry birds of prey, so nothing was going to stop “Mama bear” from protecting “sweet Frankie.” Not even a breastfeeding session.

Oakley told TODAY Parents, “It was just a split second reaction ...There was nowhere to put Willow down at that point.” Sometimes being a mom means feeding your child and saving your pet all at the same time.

As for how she feels about running around topless in her underwear on camera, Oakley declared, “I could have been naked and I’m like, ‘whatever, I’m feeding my baby.’”

Needless to say, people were impressed with Oakley’s fierce multitasking abilities.

“Tell me you're a super mom without telling me you're a super mom,” wrote one person.

Another added, “this was 100% the most badass, amazing, award deserving feat I have ever seen.”

To no one’s surprise, moms were finding the situation ultra relatable.

“I wish I could say I hadn’t run out mid breastfeed to save a chicken lol but that would be a lie,” one mom commented.

“My husband sent [this] to me and said hey look it’s you,” wrote another.

And perhaps the best comment of all:

“Girl I thought that was a water gun. Read the caption and realized it was a baby.”

Though she clearly wowed the internet, Oakley sees the entire fiasco as a mundane reality.

"It feels like an accomplishment, I suppose,'' she told TODAY, “but for me this was a day in the life."

breastfeeding mom saves goose

And the winner for "Most Tasks Done In A Single Minute" goes to...

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Not every mom has to save a pet goose from an eagle attack and breastfeed at the same time, but most mothers can relate to the almost comical, certainly never-ending juggling act that is parenting.


This article originally appeared on 6.27.22

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Man asks how to help his wife who works full-time with a baby at home and keeps getting the same answer

More and more families are trying to scrape by — by trying to do it all

Photo by Katie Emslie on Unsplash

There are times in parenting where you just feel kind of useless.

You can't carry the baby, take a late-night breastfeeding shift, or absorb any of the pain and discomfort of childbirth.

Sometimes the best you can do is to try to take care of your partner.

That's what brought user u/DietyBeta to the AskParents subreddit with a well-meaning question.

"My wife watches our 1yo, works, and is 12 week pregnant. How can I make her daily life easier while I'm away at work?"

He says that when he gets home from work, he takes over all parenting and homemaking duties.

But yeesh! That's still... a lot to handle. No wonder his wife is stressed out.

A few folks chimed in to pat the OP on the back. After all, it's great to see a dad who realizes how much is falling on mom's shoulders and actively looking for ways to lighten the load!

Some helpful suggestions rolled in, like taking over meal prep and making her easy lunches to heat up, hiring cleaners, or paying someone to walk the dogs.

woman in black shirt lying on couch Photo by Alexander Grey on Unsplash


But then even more people came in to the comments asking the same question over and over: If mom is working, why isn't the 1-year-old in daycare?

u/young-mommy wrote: "Is the one year old in daycare? If not, I would start there. Working from home with a child gets harder and harder as they enter toddlerhood"

u/min2themax said: "It’s nice of you to be asking how to help her but she really is getting the fuzzy end of the lollipop here. It sounds like she is literally always working or parenting. Sometimes both at the same time. Walking the dogs and making her lunches and prepping meals and doing laundry is all well and good but this is not at all sustainable."

u/alternative-box3260 said: "Have the one year old in daycare. I was in a similar situation and it’s impossible. I was able to breath after that, not before."

And u/sillychihuahua26 wrote: "She’s caring for your 1.year old while working? That’s a horrible plan. You guys need childcare like yesterday."

We have a legitimate childcare crisis in our country, and stories like this one really bring it to life.

Childcare in the United States isn't nearly accessible or affordable enough for most families. Period.

ChildCare Aware found that that average cost of childcare in 2022 was $10,853 per year, or roughly 10% of a median family income (in 2024, it's likely even more than that — yet the actual workers at childcare centers are somehow severely underpaid).

But even that eye-popping number is conservative. Anyone who lives anywhere close to a city (or in California or New York) knows the number will be way higher. It's just not feasible for most families to put their child, let alone multiple children, in full-time care while they're young.

And yet! The percentage of households with two parents working full-time has been rising for decades. Life is more expensive than ever, and the extra income from two working parents really helps, even if it's offset by those child care costs.

More and more families are trying to scrape by — by trying to do it all

woman in white shirt sitting on brown wooden armchair Photo by Keren Fedida on Unsplash

Now we don't know whether the OP's family can afford childcare for their 1-year-old or not, although in a later update to the post he wrote:

"As far as daycare, she doesn't want to because she feels like she would be missing out on the time"

So even if you can afford childcare, there's the still the crushing guilt of shipping your child off to be raised by strangers to deal with! Classic.

(Take one guess who shoulders most of the daycare guilt — dads or moms?)

The work-from-home revolution has been a Godsend for parents in certain ways — flexibility, balance, less commuting time — but its also saddled many of them with double duty.

'Hey how about you work full-time because we need the money AND keep an eye on the kids, since you're home anyway!'

But it doesn't work like that, and trying to do both is crushing modern parents.

In fact, the Surgeon General of the United States just put out an official advisory based on the plummeting mental state of today's parents.

We know parents are having a hard time and that it's getting picked up in the national conversation. But hearing about a mom working full-time with a 1-year-old on her hip while pregnant, and a dad stuck working out of the house who's at a total loss for how to make things better really paints a pretty bleak picture.

No one should have to work full-time and parent full-time, at the same time.

A fridge full of microwavable lunches and a fleet of dog walkers isn't going to make it any better until things start changing from the very top.

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Pop Culture

Wordle freaks, welcome to the soul-crushing awesomeness of Quordle

Nine tries to guess four Wordles at once? You're welcome and I'm sorry.

Screenshot via Quordle

Quordle is like Wordle on steroids.

Yes, yes, I know. Wordle, Wordle, Wordle.

A few years ago, the world was thoroughly Wordle-ized. By now you're either a dedicated daily player or are trying your best to ignore the yellow and green boxes that flood your social media feed each day. As a self-professed word nerd, I'm a fan. Word games are my jam, and Wordle is just challenging enough to be fun without being too taxing. It's a light little exercise to get my brain moving over coffee in the morning and a fun little collective endeavor to share with my fellow humans.

But we couldn't just remain satisfied with our sweet little Wordle game, right? Of course not. Why let a good thing be when we can drive ourselves batty with something else?

Friends, allow me to introduce you to Quordle. You're either going to love me or hate me for this—I'm still not even sure how I feel about myself for being sucked into it. It's awesome and terrible and I can't stop playing.

Quordle, you might guess from the name, means four Wordles. But you're guessing at all of them at the same time with a single word. You get nine tries total to correctly guess all four words.

It's both glorious and torturous. You're welcome. And I'm sorry.

Let me show you what it looks like.

First of all, there are two modes of playing. There's the Daily Quordle, which is the same four words for everyone, one game per day, just like Wordle.

But there's also Practice Quordle, which basically just means you can play as many times as you want. Dangerous.

I'll show you a practice one so I don't spoil anything. Here's what it looks like when you start a practice round:

Screenshot via Quordle

As you can see, there are four "quadrants" where words get entered. The only thing that stinks is that you really can't see all of the rows at once. There are more blank rows for the bottom two words that you have to scroll to see, but it really isn't that big of a deal while you're playing.

Whatever word you enter on each round gets put into all four quadrants. Then, just like in Wordle, the right letters in the wrong places turn yellow and the right letters in the right place turn green. Letters that aren't used remain gray.

Here I am four guesses in (in two different images, since I had to scroll down to see the bottom two quadrants). As you can see, I guessed TONIC correctly for the top right word on the third guess and SLANT for the bottom left word on the fourth guess.

Screenshot via Quordle

And as you can see, the keyboard shows which quadrants contain the letters you've guessed, either in the wrong place (yellow) or the right place (green).

Screenshot via Quordle

The main goal is to get all four words in nine tries or less, but the lower any of the numbers, the better. I did quite well in this particular practice round, getting all four words in six total guesses.

(In fact, this practice round was a bit of redemption after only getting three of the four words in the Daily Quordle today. I had two possible choices for my ninth guess and picked the wrong one. Argh.)

Screenshot via Quordle

Like Wordle, the Quordle interface is super simple; there are no ads or anything extraneous. Also like Wordle, Quordle was created by some guy (his name is Freddie Meyer) who had been playing Dordle (a two-word Wordle challenge) with some friends in January. Another guy in their group, David Mah, came up with Quordle and Meyer perfected it. Now it's got a million players. (Meyer says on the website that he has no plans to monetize Quordle. Maybe he'll end up selling it to The New York Times for seven figures like the Wordle guy did, and if he does? Hey, more power to him.)

This is what humans do, right? Create cool things? Improve and innovate on what came before? Make our brains hurt and drive one another nuts in the best way? Yay, humanity.

So, fellow word nerds, give Quordle a try and see what you think. Again, you're welcome and I'm sorry.


This article originally appeared on 2.17.22

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Dad perfectly explains why he wants his kids' teenage friends to hang out at his house

'Be that house!'

Photo by LaShawn Dobbs on Unsplash
a group of people sitting on a swing

Every group of teenage friends usually has that one house with the “cool parents” where everyone can hang out. It’s usually a place where there isn’t much judgment but plenty of snacks and a teen-friendly place to hang like a garage, living room or basement.

There are two types of parents who don’t mind having teens over all the time. One type allows the kids to drink and party because, “you’re gonna do it anyway, might as well do it here.” The other kind likes having kids around so they can be sure they don’t get into that type of trouble.

Jeremy Serrano, a Lutheran pastor in Northern California who has three children ages 12, 15 and 17, recently went viral on TikTok for explaining why parents should strive to “Be that house!” where kids hang out.

@jeremypserrano

Be that house! #parenting #parentsoftiktok #progressiveclergy

"I was talking to another parent the other day and they asked me, 'Why do you always have teenagers over at your house?'" Serrano said on TikTok. "One of the things that we've worked really hard on is being the house that the teenage friends of my children want to hang out at."

The Serrano house is a teenagers’ paradise. It’s stocked with snacks and has an ax-throwing target, basketball hoop and trampoline.

"My wife and I, we intentionally ask our children's friends what kind of food and drinks they like and then we make sure that we have those things on hand for them," he said in the video.

"It's just one of the best things that we've ever done," added Serrano. "Because we get to know our kids' friends and then we know that they're hanging out here."

The house may be a place where kids can let loose, but there’s no illicit partying happening. "We have boundaries and don't allow that here," he told Today. "In fact, I'd lose credibility with my children by not providing boundaries."

The TikTok post received a lot of positive comments from people who loved growing up in “that house.”

"My mother law told me once… food, drinks, and activities will always be cheaper than lawyers, legal fees, and therapists," anmccoy74 wrote. "This was my house growing up and my mom said that when I went away to college she lost not just one son but more like 5 sons," Gridpod added.

"I've always said I want to be the house the kids go hang out at so I can be a trusted place for them but most importantly my kids tell me their lives," Addie Davis wrote.

Serrano told Today that the teens are comfortable coming to him for advice because of the open environment he’s created. "I was really honored that my children pointed their friends to me—the first time it happened I was like, 'Whoa that is a big deal,'" he said. "My rule is, they can share our conversations with anyone they want, but I won't. If their parents ask if we've talked, I won't lie, but I'll point them back to their children."

After his post went viral, the pastor posted a subsequent video where he shared some tips on how to create “that house.”

@jeremypserrano

Replying to @moeffinmary tip#1 be a non judgmental presence. #parenting #parentingtips

"I think the number one way to be ‘that house’ is to be parents that provide a non-judgmental presence and non-judgmental listening to your kids' friends,” Serrano said.

He added that it’s important to "really get to know their sides of things. To really try to understand how they're feeling in response to situations.” Serrano says parents shouldn’t think of what the teens are saying as “good or bad” but just to “be there and listen to them."

In the end, having “that house” is all about creating a great environment for the entire family. "We get to be involved in our children's lives," he says. "And provide a safe space among chaos in the world."


This article originally appeared on 1.4.23

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