Virginia woman is changing people’s perceptions about parents with disabilities.

By Anna Medaris Miller

The way Shelby Nicholas describes her mom is the way most typical teens describe theirs: “She’s crazy,” says Nicholas, a 16-year old in the Prince William County School System who prefers to say she is “going on 17.”

Nicholas’s mom shuttles her to and from school and the movies, badgers her about her homework and teases her about her adoration of the Washington Nationals’ Bryce Harper. On this Monday night, Nicholas is grudgingly working to boost her geometry grade. If she doesn’t, the family outing to the baseball game is on the line, her mom warns.

Nicholas rolls her eyes. Life goes on in their Woodbridge, Va., condo much like it does in the homes of teenagers around the country.

Except one thing is different: Nicholas’s mom is in a wheelchair. Diagnosed with a progressive neuromuscular disease called Charcot-Marie-Tooth as an infant, Amy Nicholas, 50, has lost control of her fingers, wrists and legs. She uses a power wheelchair to get around, a wrist grip on the steering wheel to drive and various gadgets including an electric can opener to deal with daily annoyances. She’s also gotten creative with her teeth.

“Along the way, with each loss of some function or another, I’m just constantly trying to replace it with some…device that will take its place,” says Amy Nicholas, who also has a 14-year-old son, Luke. She and her children’s father, who lives in Indiana, divorced five years ago.

According to the National Council on Disability, Amy Nicholas is one of more than 4.1 million parents with disabilities in the United States. And while that number is growing — veterans returning home from Iraq and Afghanistan with injuries, for example — support for them is falling behind: In a 2012 report, the council found that parents with disabilities often have trouble accessing reproductive health care, face discriminatory treatment in child custody and adoption cases, and regularly confront other barriers related to being a parent.

“We know it’s happening and it’s happening a lot,” says Robyn Powell, an attorney advisor at NCD.  “Ultimately, more and more people with disabilities are going to choose to be parents [and that’s] something we should support.”

‘Out of my grasp’

Amy Nicholas didn’t always imagine herself as a mother. In fact, she never even thought she’d get married. “It just seemed as something that was out of my grasp,” she says.

And no one tried to convince her otherwise: Her neurologist told her never to have children and her grandmother told her to “leave that to someone else,” she remembers.

But after marrying her former husband in 1985, she began caring for her neighbors’ young children. “When they trusted me to be able to take care of their children and I had the confidence that I could, then I realized that yeah, I do want to be a mom,” she says.

Since then, Amy Nicholas has raised Shelby and Luke — and in the last several years, largely by herself.

“The misperception that a person with a disability is not as capable of caring for a child or doing what an able bodied person can needs to cease — and that can be done legislatively,” she says.

For example, two-thirds of child welfare laws allow discrimination based on disabilities, according to Powell. Some states have statutes that include disability as grounds for termination of parental rights. As a result, parents with disabilities are more often referred to child welfare services and permanently separated from their children at disproportionately high rates, the NCD report found. Adoption and assisted reproductive technology services are also often denied to parents with disabilities, accessible housing is rarely made for families and public transportation can be a nightmare.

“We are 23 years past the Americans with Disabilities Act and this is one of the last areas where people with disabilities are legally allowed to be discriminated against,” says Powell. “We need to be looking at this.”

In the public eye

Amy Nicholas was inspired to go to law school after a car rental company refused her request for a car equipped for people with disabilities. These are the types of things she doesn’t stand for. But it wasn’t until a friend suggested she go to law school that she considered making a career out of it. She graduated from the Robert H. McKinney School of Law in 2012 and is currently looking for a job.

But Amy Nicholas still hesitates to call herself an activist.

“I mean I’m out there, I’m in the public eye, I do everything that an able-bodied person does,” she says. “So I guess if you want to call that an advocate of being out there and not shying away from things that may be difficult.”

Not only has Amy Nicholas not shied away from the big things such as parenting and the little things such as doing the laundry, she also hasn’t shied away from the things that most people — with a disability or without — would. According to Shelby and Luke Nicholas, their mom has gone skydiving, bull riding and white water rafting, too.

“Most people look at her and feel sorry for her, but there’s no reason to feel sorry for her,” Shelby Nicholas says. “She’s used to being in a wheelchair — she’s been in one and out of one her whole life. It doesn’t keep her from doing what she wants to get done.”

Research links strong social connections with longevity. Two men are living proof. 

By Anna Medaris Miller

WASHINGTON, DC, 5 May 2013 — When you’re eight, making a new friend is as easy as sharing a shovel on the playground or the driveway between your yards. When you’re eighteen, it means keeping your dorm room door open or tapping a keg on your lawn.

But when you’re 88? That’s a different story.

According to a study this year in Psychological Bulletin, social networks tend to increase throughout adolescence and early adulthood, reaching a plateau around age 30 and declining steadily thereafter. By the time you reach 70 or 80, that circle is small. What’s more, the likelihood that your friends have passed away — or at least moved away — is great. But maintaining friendships or making new friends is no less important in old age.

“What has been clear in the close relationship literature is just how crucial relationships are for our emotional well-being [and] physical well-being,” says Beverley Fehr, a social psychologist at the University of Winnipeg and author of the book “Friendship Processes.” “Even mortality rates are being connected to whether or not one has close relationships in one’s life.”

In one 2010 meta-analysis of 148 studies comprising more than 308,000 people, for example, researchers found that participants with weaker social relationships were 50 percent more likely to die than those with stronger connections — a risk comparable to smoking 15 cigarettes a day and one more deadly than obesity. And that’s likely a conservative estimate, the researchers say, since the studies didn’t distinguish between positive and negative connections.

Quality and quantity

Why might friends be so good for our health — not to mention our happiness? There’s likely an evolutionary explanation, says UCLA psychologist Steve Cole.

“The most distinctive feature of human beings relative to other animals is the extent to which we assemble into big groups for our basic survival,” he says. “So humans, in our evolution, made this unusually strong bet on sociality as the way that we’re going to be living in the world.”

Cole and colleagues have found that the gene expression profiles of people who are “chronically lonely” are different from those with strong social connections. The differences seem to make the loners’ immune systems more susceptible to diseases including atherosclerosis and cancer.

Cole says the most “biologically toxic” aspect of loneliness is that it can make you feel chronically threatened, an emotion that can wear on the immune system. “It’s really that sense of unsafe threat, that vague worry, that’s probably what’s actually kicking off the fight-or-flight stress responses that affect the immune system most directly,” he says.

But recently, research has suggested that quantity of friendships might be just as — if not more so — important than quality. In the study, published in the journal PNAS, scientists evaluated the mortality rates of 6,500 British men and women over age 52 for about seven years. As expected, they found that participants who had reported feeling lonely were more likely to die. Those who were more socially isolated had higher mortality rates, too. But when those factors were teased apart, the researchers found that social isolation — not loneliness — appeared to be the real death threat.

“Although both isolation and loneliness impair quality of life and well-being, efforts to reduce isolation are likely to be more relevant to mortality,” the researchers write.

‘The Pied Pipers of Grand Oaks’

Benjamin Nickson, an 88-year-old resident of Grand Oaks Assisted Living Facility in Washington, DC, knows the importance of exercising his social skills in addition to his mind and body. Since his wife died in 2008, the World War II veteran has made many new friends. He says the best place to make new friends at Grand Oaks is in the dining room.

“I’ve never regarded myself as a really gregarious, open person, but I find myself interested in people,” says Nickson, who’s a graduate of Harvard Law School and a former budget analyst for the Pentagon.  “I like to ask questions and respond to questions, and visit them in their room[s]. That’s the way you build it up.”

One of Nickson’s best friends is Seymour Rubin, an 89-year-old philosopher who  has a condition that causes joint pain. Rubin moved to Grand Oaks three months ago to recover from several operations. He was planning to stay only temporarily, but after meeting Nickson, he’s changed his mind.

“What attracted me to Ben was his patience,” says Rubin, who’s also a World War II veteran and a widower.

Every morning at 6:30 a.m., Nickson and Rubin take a walk through the corridors of Grand Oaks. They often eat together and recently, Nickson begun teaching Rubin how to play the trumpet.

“To cement the friendship, he’s teaching me to blow the horn,” says Rubin. “We’ve already picked out a name for ourselves for when we go on the road: We are the ‘Pied Pipers of Grand Oaks.’”

The pair is proof that you’re never too old to make a new friend. After all, your life may depend on it.

This story is adapted from an article in Monitor on Psychology, also by Anna Miller. Read it here. 

You don’t know custard until you’ve tasted Kopp’s, a Milwaukee-area tradition.

By Anna Miller

Buddy Reinhart, of Milwaukee, Wis., can’t go out to lunch, pick up his dry cleaning or go to the doctor without being stopped.  That is, if he’s still wearing his distinctive white uniform from his job as the general manager of Kopp’s, a family-owned custard joint with three locations in the Milwaukee area.

“I could go anyplace — the dentist, the hospital — and if I got my whites on, people will say, ‘You work at Kopp’s?’” says Reinhart, who’s worked at the greasy spoon for 47 years. “Everybody knows Kopp’s and it makes you proud when people say, ‘Oh that’s my favorite place.’”

And for many in the area and elsewhere, it is.

Meggie Wagner, a 25-year-old Milwaukee-area native, for example, says Kopp’s was the first place she drove to when she got her driver’s license at age 16. “As a kid, I went every couple weeks,” says Wagner, whose favorite flavor is grasshopper fudge. “You can always count on [my mom] to have a carton or two of the custard in the freezer at home.”

Bob Faw, a retired TV reporter in Chevy, Chase, Md., says a tub of Kopp’s custard is the first thing he looks for in the freezer when he visits relatives in the area every few years. “The custard there is worth the trip to Milwaukee,” he says. “Nothing back here even comes close.”

The restaurant, which has been in operation since 1950, is known for its bow-tied staff, its buttery burgers and of course, its custard. And while Kopp’s has maintained its familial feel and emphasis on quality over time, Reinhart says that the Glendale-based store that was once an “itty bitty” shop in downtown Milwaukee now dishes out more custard than any other individual store in the state.

‘Every year is better’

Kopp’s began in 1950 when Elsa Kopp, a German immigrant and mother of three, launched the store under the guidance of Leon Schneider, who owned a custard store across town and sold Kopp custard machines. “She worked morning ‘til midnight, every day, seven days a week,” says Reinhart.  When her three children came home from school, they would help her too. One of those children, Karl, is the owner of Kopp’s today.

Over the years, the store has relocated and multiplied. It’s lived in various parts of the city and some of its outposts have been sold and resold. Others have closed.  But today, three locations — Glendale, Brookfield and Greenfield, all suburbs of Milwaukee — stand strong under the Kopp family name.

Reinhart estimates the store today brings in millions of dollars, employs about 60 people and serves about 2,000 customers a day. “It’s grown leaps and bounds” since he first started working there in the 1960s, he says. “Every year is better and better.”

They’ve even started shipping custard overnight to customers who crave it in other parts of the country. “It’s not really a money maker,” Reinhart says, but it’s a nice gift for people like Faw, who got a shipment on his birthday, and Reinhart’s son, who lives in Arizona.

A secret recipe

Reinhart won’t tell you how the custard is made. “I can’t give ingredients because we have our own recipe,” he says. “If people could get it, then they wouldn’t pay us for it.” But he will tell you that the store gets its plain vanilla mix from a company in Appleton, Wis., and that the additional fixings and flavors are always of the highest quality. If the intended taste is lemon, for example, Kopp will have lemon extract shipped from Palermo, Italy, says Reinhart.

“Mr. Kopp never wanted anything cheap — he wanted the best,” says Reinhart. “He’s always said ‘give [the customers] a lot of stuff, and give them quality stuff.’ That’s the philosophy.”

Reinhart, who ironically doesn’t have a sweet tooth himself, says the richest flavor is turtle sundae. His wife’s favorite is caramel cashew. And his son? “That guy will eat anything,” he says.

Kopp’s used to just serve the classics,vanilla and chocolate. But today, it rotates through hundreds of flavors, offering two additional varieties each day. The creations are mostly dreamed up by Kopp and mixed in house, where plain vanilla mix is churned into creamy concoctions such as “maple syrup and pancakes,”  “German apple streusel” and “midnight chocolate cake.” The method is one of trial and error: There’s no lab, no consultants, no market research. Just instinct.

“People don’t believe it because we’re so old fashioned,” says Reinhart.

But however the custard is made, and whatever it’s made with, it’s working. Faw, whose favorite Kopp’s flavor is eggnog, says he puts nuts, berries and sauces on the ice cream he buys at the grocery store. But Kopp’s custard doesn’t need toppings. “You don’t touch that stuff,” he says. “I’d put [Kopp’s] next to sex and skiing — it’s that good.”

By Anna Miller