Amy Lindgren

We’re hearing that the job market has tightened, and I’m seeing the signs myself. Between layoffs in nonprofits and government, and downsizing for corporations affected by tariffs or other factors, hiring is slowing noticeably.

Job seekers who want to prevail will need to do more than respond to postings. One option might be hiding in the document you’ve been emailing with all your applications: Your résumé.

“Shopping your résumé” is what I call the process of looking for new work opportunities by reviewing each position you’ve held. While anyone with a work history is a candidate for success here, this is one of those times when older workers have an advantage. They’ve simply worked more places and with more people than younger job seekers.

To get started, gather up your current and previous résumés. (By the way, this exercise is reason enough to save all your old résumés. Even though the oldest jobs may have fallen off the page, so to speak, they still represent your personal and professional history.)

With your work history in hand, the next step is fairly simple: Look at all the employers and rank them — which would you work for again? That would include your high school jobs, by the way. I once had a client who snagged a manager role in a grocery store after completing his driving career. He had enjoyed working in groceries as a teenager and found it even more satisfying in his 60s.

But what if you don’t find an employer in your background that you would work for again? Or what if they don’t really exist anymore?

No worries, the shopping can continue. By my count, there are four categories that can be exploited for potential leads or employment when you sift through your work history: The employer; clients you served for the employer; vendors, partners or consultants you worked with on behalf of the employer; and co-workers / past managers from your time with the employer.

As an example, I introduced this concept to participants in a daylong workshop a few years ago. One fellow took me seriously and when we broke for lunch, he began calling past co-workers. In just an hour, he was able to nail down a meeting with a co-worker’s new boss, at a different company, based on her referral. That was a big grin he was wearing for the afternoon session.

You might have a more intuitive or efficient method, but here’s how I might organize things: On a word processing page or piece of paper, I would list each employer, with subheadings for co-workers, managers, clients, vendors, etc. Then I would populate the sub-sections as best I could.

All kinds of things are going to happen as you do this. First, your memory will play some tricks — was Sally the CPA at XYZ company or was she at Acme? Who was that consultant you were assigned to help back at Acme?

Next, you’ll realize that you don’t know how to reach most folks, or that some have retired or even passed away. This is normal, so keep going — there will be gaps no matter how hard you squint and try to fill them.

Now you have decisions to make. If there’s an employer in your past that you would work for again, do you still know anyone there? If so, you don’t need a complicated plan — just reach out and ask if they’d have time for a cup of coffee or phone call.

If you can’t find a past contact, you can try to make a new one. The gold standard would be the current manager of the department where you’d like to work. If you can find that name and contact information, your outreach could be a short email where you introduce yourself as a former employee who has added skills and industry knowledge, while retaining an understanding of how that company works. Ask for a meeting and attach your résumé, then move on to the next one.

In addition to contacting the employers themselves, don’t forget about the other people on your list. For example, if you regularly attended meetings with people from other companies, they could be good contacts. In all cases, your goal is to have a conversation, ask if they or their departments need help, and ask who else you should contact.

Does shopping your résumé work? In my experience, sometimes it does. Since you can’t know until you try, you’ll have to jump in to find that answer yourself.

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Amy Lindgren owns a career consulting firm in St. Paul. She can be reached at alindgren@prototypecareerservice.com.

In many cultures throughout history, spring and summer have been associated with rebirth, life and vitality, and are celebrated. But for some people, this time of year is anything but celebratory. For them, warm weather brings on feelings of anxiety and persistent agitation.

In the popular consciousness, Seasonal affective disorder is most often associated with the feelings of depression that arise during cold, overcast winter months — but there is a warm-weather variant as well.

Jami Dumler, regional clinic director for Thriveworks in Pennsylvania, said warm-weather SAD is more associated with anxiety and agitation than depression, and is less common.

“With winter seasonal depression, that might look like increased sleeping, weight gain, lacking energy, withdrawing from your social circles, versus that more agitated summer SAD [which] might look like insomnia, weight loss, agitation or mood swings and anxiety as a whole,” Dumler said.

Winter SAD’s onset is associated with the changing of the seasons and the cold weather, being stuck indoors, shorter days and less sunlight exposure. However, Dumler said, there is a correlation between extreme heat and agitation. People on psychiatric medications such as antidepressants or mood stabilizers, for example, may have more difficulty regulating their body’s temperature, she said.

Dr. Dhanalakshmi Ramasamy, psychiatrist at Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley Health Network, said increased sunlight also can lead to sleep disturbances, which can have a downstream effect on mental health. However, Ramasamy added, SAD during warm weather months is not quite as well understood as the winter variant and more research is needed.

Dumler added that for people who are already prone to depression or anxiety, the onset of summer SAD may have a compounding effect. Even beyond SAD, summer and spring can create mental health challenges for some. Suicides and suicide attempts tend to be higher in spring.

“It can be a challenging time of year when folks are turning a corner and seeing the joy and brightness of summer, getting out and getting active, and if you are still struggling, that can feel really alienating and lead to people stepping more into that suicidal space,” Dumler said.

The warm weather months and all that go with it can cause flare-ups or problems for people with other mental health conditions or mental illnesses, doctors said.

Dr. Jordan Holter, psychiatrist with St. Luke’s Penn Foundation, said going to pools or the beach may have impacts on people with body dysmorphia, as wearing more revealing clothes may be triggering.

Holter added that for children with conditions like autism spectrum disorder or who have intellectual disabilities, the loss of a structured environment may be disruptive and exacerbate their condition. For children with ADHD, depression or anxiety, the return to school and all the stresses and pressures that come with it may lead to visits to the emergency room, he said.

“By having them be outside of a structured setting, that can oftentimes exacerbate those symptoms and that can cause anxiety,” Holter said. “Oftentimes, what happens too is they call it like a like a drug holiday — people that have been diagnosed ADHD are on stimulants oftentimes, will frequently be recommend to go off of the medication for a brief period of time, usually during the summer months where they don’t really have the same kind of academic demand, where they need to focus and concentrate. Because of that, you can oftentimes have a remission, reemergence of those symptoms.”

Ramasamy said that overall, LVHN sees fewer children presenting to emergency departments during the summer but those who do show up usually present with more severe and complex issues.

All the mental health professionals The Morning Call spoke to said that taking care of your mental health during summer is possible with available tools.

Dumler said that for her patients, she prioritizes social connection, physical health and mental health.

“Often, if you have both or all three of those things going, you’re going to have more impact than just focusing on one,” Dumler said.

Getting exercise, eating a healthy diet with lots of fiber, and taking time to plan things with family and friends can all play a part in improving mental health during the summer. She added that light therapy can help in treating both summer and winter variants of SAD.

Holter said selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, antidepressants and traditional therapy are, of course, options as well.

Ramasamy said one of the things she recommends is making lifestyle modifications that allow people to increase the levels of vitamin D in their bodies. She said another is adopting good sleep hygiene habits like going to bed at a consistent time and not spending time on devices right before bed.

“We cannot exclude suicidal thoughts and things like that,” Ramasamy said. “If it’s getting worse, of course, they can go to the ER, call 911, the suicide hotline [988] to get the support they need.”

By Madyson Fitzgerald, Stateline.org

A couple of years ago, Alisa Jno-Charles saw her now 9-year-old daughter watching a YouTube video of several children and their swift ninja moves.

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The video was from Ninja Kidz TV, a YouTube channel that features four young siblings who were raised in a martial arts studio, according to their official website. The channel has about 23.9 million subscribers.

Jno-Charles scrolled through the Ninja Kidz TV videos and noticed that the content featured more than just the kids’ ninja antics: Every single part of their lives was documented, she said.

“It was their first date, and their insecurities about social situations, and major life decisions — like the type of school they should go to — and their birthday parties,” Jno-Charles said. “It was everything. And that didn’t sit well with me.”

Jno-Charles did some more digging into “kidfluencing” on YouTube. She knew, of course, about social media influencers, and that it had become accepted as a legitimate job — for adults. But were there protections, she wondered, “for children who can’t actually make that decision to go into that business themselves?”

An increasing number of state lawmakers are asking the same question.

In the absence of federal regulations, some legislators are pushing to protect child influencers. Many of the measures aim to ensure kids are compensated fairly for their work, by requiring adult account managers — usually their parents — to set aside any earnings in a trust fund the children can access once they are adults. Some of the bills also aim to give children more control over the content they are featured in.

The experience with her daughter prompted Jno-Charles, an assistant professor of entrepreneurship at Babson College in Wellesley, Massachusetts, to research the fast-growing industry.

In a paper published earlier this year in the Journal of Business Ethics, Jno-Charles and Canadian researcher Daniel Clark concluded that kidfluencing was “a new form of child labor” that can financially exploit kids and violate their privacy, among other harms.

“Kidfluencing represents a uniquely insidious threat because (it’s) seemingly so benign,” Jno-Charles and Clark wrote. “It is prone to willful blindness from the parents, the platforms, the audience, and society at large.”

The risks are especially great, they argue, when kidfluencers are the family’s primary source of income, “obscuring the distinction between the best interests of the child and those of the family.”

But Jno-Charles said many of the state bills focus on financial compensation while ignoring other issues, such as the child’s reputation and whether it will harm their future employment opportunities, relationships and more.

“We’ve seen so many stories come out on families that have exploited and abused their children in a lot of very terrible ways, the least of which is monetarily,” she said. “How do you protect children from those situations? I feel like these regulations are a good start, but it’s not really addressing what I perceive to be the true issues around influence.”

40 million subscribers

Kidfluencers and other content creators make money by hawking products and services to the people who follow them. The job has become increasingly lucrative as companies spend more on social media marketing. Some influencers can earn $10,000 or more for a single post, said Alex Ambrose, a policy analyst at the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, a nonprofit focused on science and technology.

Ryan’s World is largely credited as being the first kidfluencer channel on YouTube. The channel got its start in 2015 with videos featuring 3-year-old Ryan Kaji, who enjoyed unboxing new toys.

Today, Ryan is entering his teen years, and Ryan’s World has nearly 40 million subscribers. The Ryan’s World brand is managed by Sunlight Entertainment, a family-owned production company headed by Ryan’s father. And this year, Ryan Kaji was No. 21 on the Forbes Top Creators list, with $35 million in earnings as of late June.

“It’s so easy for children to just start creating,” Ambrose said. “And with TikTok and Instagram, the ability to edit videos and edit content now is so much easier than it was in the past. You can just start creating with very simple tools that are available to folks.”

Kidfluencers are growing in popularity across nearly every social media platform. While some youths have started accounts on their own, others are managed and monitored by their parents.

Other forms of media already have labor standards. Children who appear on television or in films have contracts that stipulate what they will be paid. Some states, including California, Illinois, Louisiana, New Mexico and New York, have laws mandating that employers of child actors set aside a portion of their earnings — generally 15% — in a trust the actors can access when they become adults.

The first such law was enacted by California in 1939. The Coogan Law was inspired by child actor Jackie Coogan, who played the title role in Charlie Chaplin’s “The Kid” and was one of Hollywood’s first child stars. When Coogan became an adult, he discovered that his parents had squandered much of the money he had earned.

States step in

In 2023, Illinois expanded its version of the Coogan Law to include kidfluencers, and California followed suit in 2024 (the laws took effect in 2024 and 2025, respectively).

This year, at least four states — Arkansas, Montana, Utah and Virginia — have amended their child labor laws to mandate trusts and other protections for content creators who are minors. And when Hawaii this year approved its own version of the Coogan Law, it included child influencers in the definition of minors engaged in “theatrical employment.”

The New Jersey General Assembly and the New York Senate also approved child influencer legislation this year, but neither has become law.

Arkansas Republican state Rep. Zack Gramlich, who sponsored the legislation in his state, is a schoolteacher and the father of a 2-year-old and a 9-month-old. Both in the Legislature and at home, Gramlich said, he’s worked toward ensuring kids are protected when they use the internet.

The Arkansas legislation he authored has a trust requirement, but it also includes other protections for child influencers, such as requiring adults to pay minors if they are using them to create content for money. For example, a minor must be paid if they or their likeness appears in at least 30% of the content produced over 30 days, or if the adult earned at least $15,000 in the previous 12 months.

The legislation also prohibits accounts from sharing “any visual depiction of a minor with the intent to sexually gratify or elicit a sexual response in the viewer or any other person.”

This goes beyond existing prohibitions on child pornography to include, for example, parents who dress their child-influencer daughters in bikinis or dance leotards for their followers — some of whom are paying a monthly fee to see that kind of content, according to an investigation by The New York Times.

Gramlich said Google helped him write the legislation. Ambrose, of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, said other social media companies have played a similar role in other states, and are establishing new policies for content featuring children.

Instagram last month announced new protections for adult-managed accounts that primarily feature children. This includes placing these accounts into a stricter category to prevent unwanted messages and turning on filters for offensive comments, according to the announcement.

Google and Meta did not grant Stateline requests for interviews.

A handful of legislators pushed back against the bill, Gramlich said, because they were concerned about putting too much responsibility on the parents. But when a parent is making an additional $15,000 a year by posting videos of their children, he said, there must be rules.

“In some ways, this is an extension of child labor protections,” Gramlich said. “We’re at the point where kids aren’t in the mines anymore, but it looks like they’re going to be on the internet. But now, their parents may be making money off their efforts, and they never get to see it.”

Social media audiences do not see the production behind online content, Gramlich said. These audiences are only seeing the finished product. And younger kids may not realize that their work is being used for money and will forever exist online, he said.

“If you’re anything like me, you’ve been told for the last 15 years that everything you put on the internet is there forever,” Gramlich said. “But can a child really understand what that means?”

The Utah legislation also goes beyond trusts. Utah Democratic state Rep. Doug Owens, the House sponsor of the bill, wanted to make sure that child influencers had the right to delete their content once they became adults. His legislation, which was signed into law by Republican Gov. Spencer Cox in March, requires that social media companies create a process for people who want their content removed or edited.

Before the legislation was drafted, two people reached out to Owens asking him to propose protections for child actors and influencers. One was a constituent — a child actor who had appeared in traditional television commercials.

The second, he said, was Kevin Franke, the ex-husband of former YouTube family vlogger Ruby Franke. In 2023, the popular YouTube star was arrested after her 12-year-old son, with duct tape stuck to his ankles and wrists, ran to a neighbor’s house and asked for food and water. She was later convicted on child abuse charges and sentenced to up to 30 years in prison.

Recent docuseries on Netflix and Hulu have revealed the ways in which kidfluencing can lead to children experiencing peer pressure, manipulation, child abuse and, in the case of the Franke family, torture.

Both the child actor and Kevin Franke said children in the entertainment industry — including kidfluencers — should have adults who are looking out for them, Owens said.

“I think social media is just an obvious place where kids need some protection,” he said.

But most state legislatures remain focused on broader social media concerns, such as age restrictions, said Georgia Democratic state Rep. Kim Schofield, who has sponsored a child influencer bill in her state.

In February, Schofield introduced a measure that would mandate trusts for child influencers. Her bill also would restrict children’s work schedules: A child between the ages of 9 and 16, for instance, would be barred from working more than five hours a day.

“I’m so excited to see that these kids are just so talented,” Schofield said. “They have a means to broaden and expand an endless universe online — I love that I get to see that. But if you’re making so much money and making the family rich, I want to make sure that you’re getting a piece of the pie.”

©2025 States Newsroom. Visit at stateline.org. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

By KATIE WORKMAN, Associated Press

In the summer heat, we find ourselves drawn to that glorious section of the drinks menu that promises relief in the form of a cold, creamy, brain-freezing indulgence. But ordering a frozen drink looks different in different parts of the U.S., and in different restaurants and ice cream shops.

So, what is the difference between a milkshake, a malt, a frappe or maybe even a concrete?

Geography, tradition and local lingo all play a role in how frozen drinks are made and what they’re called.

Let’s break it down one strawful (or spoonful) at a time.

Milkshakes

Perhaps the most iconic of the bunch, the milkshake is typically a blend of ice cream and milk, blended until smooth and sippable. It’s simple and sweet. The ice cream usually forms the base flavor of the drink, and then other flavorings are involved, from syrups to extracts to fresh fruit.

At the Lexington Candy Shop, a 100-year-old luncheonette with an old-fashioned soda fountain on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, vanilla is the most popular milkshake — about 60% of all shakes ordered. That’s according to John Philis, who co-owns the shop with Bob Karcher, and whose grandfather, Soterios Philis, opened it in 1925.

Their next most popular flavors are chocolate, coffee and strawberry, Philis said. Lexington Candy uses homemade syrups, he says, which give the shakes “a nice wow.”

Other fan favorites at the shop include the classic black and white (vanilla ice cream and chocolate syrups) and the Broadway (chocolate syrup with coffee ice cream). In the summer, there are peach shakes.

Malts

A malt is essentially a milkshake with a scoop of malted milk powder thrown in. Malted milk powder is an old-fashioned flavoring that combines malted barley, wheat flour (caution to the gluten-free crowd) and evaporated milk. It gives the drink that distinct toasted, almost nutty flavor that transports you mentally to a 1950s diner or drive-in.

Fun fact: Malted milk powder was originally created as a nutrition booster, mostly for babies, but it found its home behind the counter of ice cream shops and luncheonettes. It adds slightly richer, old-school vibes to shakes and other frozen drinks.

There are also plenty of frozen blended drinks made with frozen yogurt instead of ice cream; these are sometimes known as fro-yo shakes.

Frappes

“Frappe” might mean different things to different people, depending on where they’re from. In New England, particularly Massachusetts, a frappe is what most of us would call a milkshake, made with milk, ice cream and usually some other flavorings.

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In Massachusetts, you will hear this drink called “frap” (rhymes with “nap”), but believe me when I say there is no consensus on the correct pronunciation of the word. Sometimes a frappe from this region might simply be flavored cold milk, no ice cream involved.

There is also a genre of frappes associated with coffee-blended drinks, popularized by chains like Starbucks. Think icy, blended lattes, often topped with whipped cream. These are pronounced “frap-pays.”

Frosteds

Philis says that in New York City and other regions, a shake used to be known as a “frosted.”

“When someone comes in and orders a ‘frosted,’ I like this person,” Philis declares.

When McDonald’s and other fast-food chains started calling shakes “shakes,” the world followed suit, and the word “frosted” went out of fashion.

A frosted float, Philis explains, is a milkshake with an extra scoop of ice cream floating on top. Talk about gilding the lily!

Concretes

Then we have the concrete, an ultra-thick, creamy frozen dessert so dense that a spoon can stand upright in it. This is essentially frozen custard blended with mix-ins like candy, cookies or fruit, but no milk is added. It’s more of a scoopable treat than a slurpable one.

Concretes are popular where frozen custard is popular — mostly in the Midwest. Frozen custard has significantly less air in it than most ice cream, and a required 1.4% of egg yolks, which gives it its signature richness.

The concrete was invented at a frozen custard shop called Ted Drewes in St. Louis. If you buy one there, the server will hand it to you upside down, saying, “Here’s your concrete,” and it won’t fall out.

Travis Dillon (whose wife, Christy, is founder Ted Drewes’ granddaughter) gave this origin story: In the 1950s, a kid named Steve Gamir used to come in and ask the guy behind the counter for “the thickest shake you can make.” Employees started leaving the milk out of Gamir’s shakes, just running the custard through the machine, resulting in a shake that requires a spoon, not a straw.

Dillon says chocolate is their most popular flavor, then chocolate chip, strawberry and Heath Bar, but adds that there are lots of other flavors to explore, including a malted chocolate concrete — the best of two frozen-drink worlds!

Floats

Ice cream floats are the fizzy cousins of shakes. A scoop of ice cream (usually vanilla) is plopped into a glass of soda (usually root beer or cola, occasionally orange soda or a lemon-lime like Sprite) to create a frothy, sweet, bubbly concoction. Floats can be nostalgic for some folks.

Lexington Candy remains old-fashioned with their floats, making the sodas to order with syrup, stirring by hand, then adding the ice cream. In some areas of the country, you might hear a root-beer float referred to as a “brown cow.”

Ice cream sodas

Like floats, ice cream sodas are not made in a blender. Philis says his are made with the syrup of your choice, coffee, half-and-half, plus seltzer. Then add a scoop of ice cream. He says usually the syrup and the ice cream are the same flavor, but people also like to mix and match.

Smoothies

Finally a word about smoothies, the supposedly more health-conscious frozen treat. Smoothies are traditionally made with fruit, yogurt, juice and sometimes ice. Sometimes, the fruit is frozen before it is blended into the drink. Smoothies are designed to feel virtuous, but they can still pack plenty of sugar, calories and richness, depending on the ingredients. For instance, if you see a peanut butter-chocolate-banana smoothie, you may realize quickly that this is more about flavor than health.

So the only question is: Is there enough time left in the summer to try the whole lexicon of frozen creamy drinks? Believe in yourself. I believe in you.

Katie Workman writes regularly about food for The Associated Press. She has written two cookbooks focused on family-friendly cooking, “Dinner Solved!” and “The Mom 100 Cookbook.” She blogs at https://themom100.com/. She can be reached at Katie@themom100.com.

For more AP food stories, go to https://apnews.com/hub/recipes