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What's in a name? Lots and lots of "Benjamins," ($100 dollar bills, that is). Unless your name happens to be Benjamin, in which case, some research suggests, you had better stick with Ben.

The Ladders, an online job-matching site, recently crunched the numbers in its database of over 6 million career professionals to determine the top names for corporate executives as well as the names of the highest earners. They found that people with first names longer than five letters lose out on about $3,600 in salary every year—and that's per letter. So, for little Alexander that means potentially missing out on more than $500,000 over the course of a 40-year career.

Want insight on how names affect other aspects of life? Read on.

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A routine part of mealtimes for many families may actually be harming your kids. A new study has found that urging your kids to join the "clean plate club" by finishing all the food on their plates can prevent them from learning healthy eating habits.

Related: Are Parents to Blame For Childhood Obesity?

"In the 1950s, cleaning your plate meant something different," Katie Loth, a registered dietician and research assistant at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis and was the lead author on the study, told HealthDay. "Portion sizes have gotten bigger over time, and if you encourage kids to rely on environmental indicators, like how much food is on their plates or the time of day, they'll lose the ability to rely on internal cues to know whether they're hungry or full."

Read on to learn more about the dangers of the clean-plate club.

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We love the crazy things kids come up with, and a kid's point of view on pop culture can't be beat. After taking a look at promo pictures for a few popular TV shows and movies, my 8-year-old offered to weigh in on what she thought they were really all about. (You may look at the picture of the Kardashian sisters and think "Oh, season premiere," but a second grader sees something totally different!) We decided to contrast her point of view with those from the 7-year-old son of The Stir's Linda Sharps. Here's what the kids had to say:

About Keeping Up With the Kardashians:

7-year-old boy: "This is a show about three girls who go out and while they're shopping a battle breaks out and they have to use their shopping carts as weapons! But their hair gets in the way. They should have ponytails, that would help. The good thing is they're wearing black like ninjas."

8-year-old girl: "This is about some girls that get into a lot of trouble. They do a lot of bad decisions. They look sort of mean. Are they singing the 'Single Ladies' song? And the ones on the ends both look like Selena Gomez if she was mean."

Hear what the "expert panel" has to say about Twilight, Teen Mom, and more after the break!

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When 5-year-old Ethan Clos showed up at school with a short, spiky mohawk last week, his fellow kindergarteners thought it was cool. But administrators at Reid Primary and Middle School in Springfield, Ohio, deemed the edgy cut too disruptive, and ordered him home until he adopted a tamer style.

His mom, Keshia Castle, said that school officials suspended her son on Wednesday. After he begged her for the hairstyle, she finally let him get it over spring break.

RELATED: Utah Teen Kicked Out of Class for Dyeing Her Hair… Auburn?

"They seen his hair like it was," she told WHIO-TV on Friday. "All the little kids were going over and feeling on it and everything."

Read on to learn how Ethan's new rocker style violated the school's dress and grooming policies.

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Close on the heels of a national debate about women and work sparked by Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg and her new book, a new survey shows that more moms would prefer to work outside of the home full time.

A new Pew Research survey found changing preferences among working moms. While 20 percent of moms with kids under age 18 said that they'd that rather work full time in 2007, that number jumped to 32 percent last year.

The shift may have more to do with economic conditions than professional ambitions, the Associated Press reported.

"Women aren't necessarily evolving toward some belief or comfort level with work," study co-author Kim Parker, an associate director at the Pew Research center, told the Associated Press. "They are also reacting to outside forces and in this case, it is the economy."

Read on to learn a few reasons why the percentage of full-time working mothers has increased.

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Worried about their 13-year-old daughter's increasingly disrespectful behavior, Gentry and Renee Nickell of Crestview, FL, decided to make her punishment humiliating and public. On Saturday, the teen (whose name has not been released) spent 90 minutes standing at a busy intersection with a handwritten sign describing her sins.

It read: "I’m a self-entitled teenager w/no respect for authority. I’m also super smart, yet I have 3 'Ds' because I DON’T CARE."

Passing motorists saw the teen, who was standing with her dad at the corner of Ferdon Boulevard and US Highway 90 in Crestview and snapped pictures of her with their cell phones. Some of the photos ended up on Facebook, where they were shared within the Crestview community (the Nickells said that they have not seen those photos; Yahoo! Shine was not able to find them online). Someone called the police, who showed up to talk to the teen and left after deciding that she was "aware of her punishment and she was not in any harm," Crestview police records show.

Related: Is Parental Shame the New Spanking?

Now, however, the parents are feeling a little public humiliation of their own.

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Callie Mitchell was a 25-year-old photography student with plans "to wander the world to capture the minuscule moments of my surroundings" when something happened that changed her life forever.

She got pregnant.

Related: Wisconsin Bill Claims Single Moms Cause Child Abuse by Not Being Married

In an essay for college newspaper The Daily Iowan, where she works as a photographer, Mitchell described her experiences as "a spontaneous moment leading to an unplanned life change. Not a mistake. Definitely a surprise." Her photo-essay and videos have had a powerful impact around the world. (You can see her entire slideshow here.)

According to the essay, she found out she was pregnant on March 25, 2012. She and her boyfriend decided to have the child and begin a new chapter in their life together.

Read on to learn how Callie felt via her intimate journal entries.

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Greg and Sharon Kitchen had company coming over, so when their youngest son, Danny, asked for their iTunes password so he could download a cool new game, they tapped it in for him and left him alone to play while they entertained their guests in their South Gloucestershire, England, home.

Related: My Kid's First iPad?

"Danny was pestering us to let him have a go on the iPad. He kept saying it was a free game so my husband put in the passcode and handed it to him," his mom told the Telegraph. "It worried me when he asked for the password but I had a look at the game it said it was free so I didn't think there would be a problem."

Related: The Best Apps for Kids

On Monday morning, the mother of five woke up to 19 emails from iTunes, listing purchases adding up to 1,710 British pounds — about $2,500 — from the night before. By the time her credit card company called her to check up on the charges, Kitchen had figured out what had happened.

Find out how Greg and Sharon handled this delicate situation after the jump.

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Celebrating birthdays at school just got a little less fun for kids in Australia. New guidelines issued Tuesday by the country's National Health and Medical Research Council say that children can no longer blow out the candles on cakes at school because doing so spreads too many germs.

Related: The Most Germy Place in Schools? It's Not What You Think

"We introduced new national standards to lift the quality of child care across Australia because we believe parents deserve peace of mind when they drop their child off they are receiving quality care to a high standard," Australia's Minister for Early Childhood and Child Care, Kate Elliss, explained in a statement. "All services across the country will be assessed and rated against new National Quality Standard which will ensure that services are meeting basic requirements including children's health, safety and wellbeing."

Read on to find out what parents think about this new birthday tradition.

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At a time when airlines are charging more for child-free seats and people are routinely enraged about out-of-control kids in public, one restaurant is rewarding parents when their pint-size diners show good manners.

When Laura King and her family got their bill at Sogno di Vino, a small Italian restaurant in Poulsbo, WA, listed under the subtotal was something they had never seen before: a discount for "Well-Behaved Kids."

Related: The No-Kids-Allowed Movement Is Spreading

King was so touched by the restaurant's gesture that she posted a picture of the receipt on her private Facebook page; a friend shared the photo on Reddit with the comment.

Read on to find out why their good behavior was rewarded.

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A New Jersey Catholic school wanted to make kids quit cursing, so they asked girls to take a vocabulary purity pledge, vowing not to use foul language for the month of February. But the boys? They were told not to swear, but they didn't have to make any promises.

Related: Is Chivalry Sexist?

"We want ladies to act like ladies," Lori Flynn, the teacher who administered the pledge at Queen of Peace High School, told The Record newspaper in Woodland Park, N.J.

Read on to find out more about this New Jersey school double standard.

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A new book on finding one's true self has rekindled an age-old discussion with a chapter saying that praise is harmful to kids. But parenting experts tell Yahoo! Shine that praise itself isn't the problem — the issue is that parents have been doing it wrong for years.

Related: Forget Tiger Mothers. Teach People How To Be Good Parents Instead

In "The Examined Life," Stephen Grosz pulls together insights gleaned from 25 years worth of work as a psychoanalyst. He became a father at age 50, and his experiences helping troubled, unhappy adults led him to agree with an old idea — that empty praise does children more harm than good.

Do Confident Kids Have More Future Career Success?

"Admiring our children may temporarily lift our sense of self-esteem but it isn't doing much for a child's sense of self," he told the British newspaper The Sunday Times. "Empty praise is as bad as thoughtless criticism — it expresses indifference to the child's feelings and thoughts."

But parenting experts agree that avoiding praise altogether isn't the answer.

Find out more after the break.

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We've all heard plenty of warnings about the dangers of fast food and how it's at least partly to blame for our childhood obesity epidemic. But a new international study shows that kids who eat fast food three or more times per week are at risk for more than just a little extra weight: Those chicken nuggets and cheeseburgers have now been linked to higher rates of asthma and eczema in kids.

Related: The Five Worst "Healthy" Fast Food Meals for Kids

The study, published Monday in the medical journal Thorax, used data from more than 319,000 13- and 14-year-olds in 51 countries, along with 181,000 6- to 7-year-olds from 31 countries. All of the participants were also involved in the International Study of Asthma and Allergies in Childhood, a collaborative research project made up of nearly 2 million children from 100 countries.

WATCH: Human Guinea Pigs Paid Thousands to Eat Fast Food Every Day

The participants' parents were asked about whether their kids experienced wheezing, rough or patchy skin, and rhinoconjunctivitis (a combination of stuffy or running nose with itchy and watery eyes) in the past 12 months. They were also asked about how frequently their kids ate certain foods, including meat, fruits, vegetables, bread, rice, nuts, milk, eggs, and commercially prepared fast food.

Learn more about the potential relation between fast food and asthma after the jump.

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Kids born during the economic recessions of the 1980s had a higher chance of substance abuse and arrest as teenagers, a new study has found, leading researchers to wonder if babies born in recent years could face a similar fate.

"The mechanisms involved may be different in intensity and severity, (but) based on the study it seems like there would be some effects," Dr. Seethalakshmi Ramanathan, a researcher at State University of New York Upstate Medical University and the lead author of the study told Reuters.

Related: Things You Need to Do While You're Unemployed

The study, which was published online this week in JAMA Psychiatry, used data from 8,984 people born between January 1, 1980, and December 31, 1984, who had participated in the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics' National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997, when they were 12 to 17 years old. There were two recessions in the 1980s, from 1980 to 1981 and then another in 1982.

Related: Are We Regulating Ourselves Back Into Recession?

The BLS' survey included questions about education, income, attitudes, expectations, thefts, arrests, drug use, alcohol use, gun use, and cigarette use, among other things. Ramanathan and her team found that certain destructive and delinquent behaviors were more common among kids who were born in areas affected by high unemployment rates. (A recession is defined as a general slowdown in economic activity with drops in Gross Domestic Product levels, incomes, business profits, and inflation while unemployment and bankruptcy rates rise; measuring the unemployment rate is one way to judge the severity of a recession in a given area.)

Find out if recession babies grow up to be troubled teens after the break.

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Hudson Kroenig: remember that name. He's fashion's rising runway star. He's also four.

On Tuesday night, Hudson walked his third Chanel runway show, at the annual Chanel Metiers d'Art collection in Scotland. Dressed like Little Lord Fauntleroy in a bowed blouse, knickers, kilt, and a velvet beret, it was the kind of outfit that would prompt most kids his age to throw a tantrum. But Hudson is a professional.

Related: Christy Turlington's 8-year-old models

At age one, he was photographed for German Vogue. By two he was taking Paris' fashion week by storm, walking for Chanel hand in hand with his father Brad. By four he had two campaigns (Fendi, Dolce&Gabbana), and several glossy photo shoots (W, Harper's Bazaar, Pirelli Calendar) under his belt.

Hudson was born into the industry. The 32-year-old Brad Kroenig is one of the leading male supermodels in the industry. After rising the ranks from Abercrombie poster-boy to the face of Chanel, Brad became close with Karl Lagerfeld, the iconic brand's creative lead. When Hudson was born in 2008, he named the eccentric designer as his son's godfather.

Read on to learn more about Karl's cutest and smallest muse.

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When I was 7 years old, I was a True Believer in Santa Claus. One of my closest friends wasn't, though, and when he insisted that the Jolly Old Elf was a lie, I was shaken — so much so that, when my parents reassured me that my friend was wrong, I didn't quite believe them.

Related: Kids-with-Santa Photos Gone Wrong

On Christmas Eve, we were invited to a party at that friend's house. I stuck close to my dad for the entire day (and bossed my younger brother into following my mom around the house), and we made sure that there was absolutely nothing under the tree when we left for the party. Once at my friend's house, I continued to shadow my parents, to see whether they left the party for any reason. They didn't.

Read on to find out how to keep the faith of Santa alive.

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In "Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother," Yale law professor Amy Chua declared her "Chinese mother" parenting skills superior to those of lazy, touchy-feely "Western parents" and seems to say that pushing children to succeed academically is the best way to guarantee their success later in life. Longtime educator Carol Cooke says that she agrees — up to a point.

Related: The Opposite of a Tiger Mother? Leaving Your Children Behind

"We all want our children to succeed academically because today, more than ever, education is the key to success. Holding high expectations and communicating those expectations to our children on a regular basis is a point on which Amy Chua and I absolutely agree," Cooke told Yahoo! Shine in an interview. "Our points of view diverge on what comes after that, and the differences are clearly cultural."

Learn more about this new parenting technique after the jump.

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Crazy baby names are nothing new. In fact, in recent years they've become endemic in our culture, with entire websites devoted to bad baby names, deliberate misspellings masquerading as parental "creativity," and celebrities who go way past "unusual" and into "Wait. What?" territory (like actor Jason Lee, who named his child Pilot Inspektor in 2003).

But Hashtag? As in, well, #hashtag? Really? Really.

Read on to learn more about this media-worthy name.

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Tracey and Dan Citron always wanted to have a baby. After six unsuccessful cycles on infertility medication, they decided to forgo IVF treatments in favor of adopting a child instead. In 2009, they settled on a Lutheran-based adoption agency near their home in Eagan, MN, and enrolled in classes on a path to get their home-study approval in order to adopt. By 2010, they were "approved" and ready to make a match, when they realized they had a lot more work to do.

"Our agency was a big advocate of outreach, since most of their domestic open adoption matches occurred that way, and it seemed to be the trend," Tracey told Yahoo! Shine. After attending a seminar hosted by the agency that taught parents how to market themselves effectively, the Citrons were fired up.

The couple printed postcards and business cards promoting their adoption search, which they would hand out to everyone they met. "When we paid waitresses, we'd stick a postcard with our tip," Tracey, a 37-year-old stay-at-home mom, recalls.

Read on to learn more about this new adoption option.

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Sophia Bailey-Klugh had already written to President Barack Obama once before, to invite him to dinner at her house. He didn't RSVP, so when the 10-year-old with two dads decided to send him a note thanking him for his support of gay marriage, she wasn't expecting a reply.

Related: North Carolina's Take on Gay Marriage Could Also Affect Straight Couples

"Dear Barack Obama," she wrote. "It's Sophia Bailey Klugh, your friend who invited you to dinner. You don't remember okay that's fine. But I just wanted to tell you that I am so glad you agree that two men can love each other, because I have two dads and they love each other, but at school kids think that it's gross and weird."

Learn more about this heartwarming story after the jump.