By MARTHA ROSE SHULMAN

Eggplant slices are ready in two or three minutes on a panini grill. If you don’t use the slices for panini, you can simply top them with tomato sauce, or chop and toss them with pasta or rice. Alternatively, try them drizzled with vinaigrette and sprinkled with feta and such fresh herbs as mint, parsley, basil or marjoram.

For each panini:

2 to 4 1/2-inch thick slices eggplant (depending on the size of the eggplant)

Salt

Extra virgin olive oil

1 tablespoon pesto (optional)

1/2 grilled red pepper, or 2 to 3 slices tomato

Freshly ground pepper

2 tablespoons grated cheese, such as mozzarella, fontina, Gruyère, or Parmesan (or a combination of these)

2 thick slices country bread

1. Sprinkle the eggplant slices with salt and let sit for 15 minutes. Pat dry and brush lightly with olive oil.

2. Preheat a panini grill, and evenly layer the eggplant slices on top. Grill three minutes, until cooked through. Remove from the grill.

3. Spread a little pesto on the bottom slice of bread. Top with a layer of eggplant slices, then a layer of pepper or tomato slices. Sprinkle with freshly ground pepper. Top with the grated cheese and the other slice of bread. Brush the outside of the bread slices, both bottom and top, with olive oil. Grill five minutes, or until nicely toasted and the cheese has melted. Remove from the grill and cut into halves or thirds, depending on the size of the panini. Serve hot.

Yield: Serves one

Advance preparation: The eggplant can be grilled and the panini assembled several hours before the panini itself is grilled.

Variations:

Add sliced red onion and chopped fresh basil to the mix.

Spoon a little vinaigrette over the tomatoes.

Sprinkle the eggplant slices with a pinch of hot red pepper flakes.

Recipes for Health

This series offers recipes with an eye towards empowering you to cook healthy meals every day. Produce, seasonal and locally grown when possible, and a well-stocked pantry are the linchpins of a good diet, and accordingly, each week’s recipes will revolve around a particular type of produce or a pantry item. This is food that is vibrant and light, full of nutrients but by no means ascetic, fun to cook and a pleasure to eat.

For Kids, One Sport or Many?

By TARA PARKER-POPE

Correction Appended

Around the country, little girls are donning leotards and tumbling into gymnastics classes — a surge of interest that typically happens every four years after the summer Olympics.

But as their daughters dream of becoming the next Shawn Johnson or Nastia Liukin, parents have new worries. Accusations that two members of the Chinese women’s gymnastic team were too young to compete have renewed focus on the Olympic rule that bars gymnasts under 16, an age limit that seeks to protect young athletes from health risks like the incessant pounding that can take a toll on a developing body.

Such worries are hardly limited to gymnastics. While pediatricians encourage children to exercise more, there is growing concern about specializing in just one sport, whether baseball, soccer or ice skating.

Growing bones can’t handle the same stresses as mature bones. When a child specializes in one sport early in life, certain body parts — the arm of a Little League pitcher, the spine of a gymnast — are subjected to repetitive stress and overuse. Especially among young soccer players, there has been an alarming rise in injuries to the anterior cruciate ligament, the main ligament that stabilizes the knee joint — a particular concern because repair involves drilling into a growth plate, an area of developing tissue at the end of the leg bone.

Many gymnasts and coaches say the fears about their sport have been overstated. “Very few athletes make it to the top level where they are pounding their body six or seven hours a day,” said Shannon Miller, an Olympic gold medalist who started the sport at age 5 and competed in 1992 at 15 and again in 1996. (The age limit was adopted after the 1996 Olympics.) “Gymnastics is a great sport to get kids involved in because it leads to so many other things, not just the Olympic Games.”

But this spring the medical journal Pediatrics published a troubling study of gymnastics-related injuries treated in hospital emergency rooms over a 16-year period ending in 2005. On average, 26,600 gymnastics-related injuries are treated by emergency room physicians every year, a rate of about 5 injuries per 1,000 participants. While only 3 percent of the patients were admitted to the hospital, many of the injuries were still serious: nearly half were strains or sprains and nearly a third were fractures or dislocations. Most were to the shoulders, arms and wrists, but a frightening 13 percent involved the head and neck.

The researchers, from Ohio State University, concluded that gymnastics had one of the highest injury rates of all girls’ sports. Lara McKenzie, the study’s lead author and a principal investigator for the Center for Injury Research and Policy at Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus, said that the study shouldn’t discourage parents from enrolling children in gymnastics, but added that they should be diligent about finding a reputable gymnastics program that emphasizes safety. Children should be discouraged from practicing while unsupervised.

“We don’t want them to give up the sport,” Dr. McKenzie said. “Some of these injuries are occurring when kids are doing gymnastics at home or unsupervised. We know when they do it at home they don’t have the same type of training mats or spotting that they would have in a more traditional setting.”

Steve Penny, president of USA Gymnastics, the sport’s governing body, says the study doesn’t accurately reflect gymnastics in an organized setting because it counts things like injuries on school playgrounds and mishaps during a backyard cartwheel. “I think most people view gymnastics as a very healthy thing for young girls,” he said.

At gymnastics centers, business is booming in the wake of the Olympics. At the California Sports Center in San Jose, enrollment jumped 33 percent in August. The owner, Dave Peterson, said parents should look for programs that help children develop skills that will enable them to compete all the way up to college if they choose.

Once children reach a skill level that allows for competition, he said, they train just two hours for three days a week. Over time, the program increases to about 21 hours a week. He added that the athlete-to-coach ratio should be about 6 to 1 in preschool and about 8 to 1 for older athletes.

In the absence of firm data about the best age to start competitive sports, the solution may not be to discourage young athletes from working out too much, but instead to encourage them to try out more sports. The journal Pediatrics reported last year that young athletes who participated in a variety of sports had fewer injuries and continued longer than those who specialized before puberty.

For young athletes determined to specialize, doctors recommend breaks from training at least one to two days a week, and long breaks every two to three months to allow the athlete to do another activity or at least cross-train to exercise different muscle groups.

Ms. Miller, the gymnast, says her sport can give children coordination, flexibility and strength that will help them in other sports. And she adds that the focus shouldn’t be on competition.

“The biggest factor is how excited they are to be there,” she said. “Are they enjoying it and having fun?”

By GINA KOLATA

UNTIL last spring, running was going great for 15-year-old Erik Kraus. He had been training hard without a break for 18 months and was becoming faster and faster.

Then, when spring track started, something went awry. Every time he raced 1,500 meters, his time was 15 seconds slower than in the previous race.

Erik’s father, Dr. William Kraus, a runner himself and a cardiologist at Duke University who studies exercise, was concerned. Erik was tired all the time; his legs felt heavy; he was frustrated, irritable. Could it be the condition that athletes dread: overtraining?

Overtraining is the downside of training, the trap that can derail an athlete’s success. It’s a real physical condition caused by pushing too hard for too long. It can happen with too much exercise, too much intense exercise, or both. Its hallmarks are poor performances, exhaustion and apathy.

“You just feel bad,” said Dr. William O. Roberts, an internist at the University of Minnesota who specializes in treating athletes and is a former president of the American College of Sports Medicine. “The spark is gone.”

It can come on so insidiously that before athletes know it, they find themselves trapped in a downward spiral. The harder they train, the worse they do.

But there’s another trap — the overdiagnoses of overtraining, said Dr. Steven Keteyian, the director of preventive cardiology at Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit.

Dr. Keteyian, who has written textbook chapters on the condition, cautions that it is quite rare. But many athletes worry about overtraining every time they fail to perform as well as they think they should.

“It doesn’t happen over a two-week period of time,” Dr. Keteyian said. And it is unlikely to strike someone running 20 miles or so a week or doing the equivalent amount of another endurance sport, he said.

“Twenty miles is nothing,” Dr. Keteyian said. “Talk to me when you are running 50 miles a week. If you are a runner and have a steady history of running 40 to 70 miles a week and now you are pushing it to 80, 90, 100 miles a week and your times are dropping and you are feeling sluggish, then I’ll start to listen.”

If overtraining has occurred, “it’s a long road back,” Dr. Keteyian said. The only cure is to take weeks or months off. No athlete wants that, Dr. Keteyian said, so it’s important not to jump to conclusions.

Dr. Kraus knew that overtraining was unlikely. But his son seemed to meet the criteria, such as they are. He began looking for credible data on overtraining but was soon disappointed to discover that overtraining remains poorly understood and understudied.

There is no definitive test for overtraining. Instead, the diagnosis is reached by exclusion. Besides slower times and fatigue, Dr. Keteyian and others say athletes may notice that their muscles are weaker and that their coordination is poorer. Their heart rates may be higher than they should be with moderate exercise. And their resting heart rates, taken first thing in the morning, can be higher, too.

Overtraining is an unintended consequence of the only known way for athletes to improve — by pushing their bodies and stressing themselves by deliberately going faster or longer than feels comfortable. “Training a little bit beyond your capabilities is the only way to get better,” Dr. Kraus said. “But you have to balance that with rest and recovery. It’s a fine line. Where is that edge and how do you get as close as possible without going over it?”

Elite athletes and their coaches are acutely aware of overtraining, said Frank Busch, the head coach for the University of Arizona’s swimming team and an assistant coach for the United States men’s Olympic swimming team. And they have become adept at heading it off.

Not too long ago, coaches thought that volume — hours upon hours of training — was the key to outstanding performances, Mr. Busch said. “The result was sort of an arms race among swimmers and other endurance athletes to see who could train the most,” he said. “Athletes began getting overtrained.”

Now coaches and swimmers know that there is a point of diminishing returns. Coaches look for signs that their athletes are doing too much. Performance is one indicator, of course, but so is something as simple as a swimmer who has stopped smiling, Mr. Busch said. “That’s usually a sign that they are dreading practice or there is something else going on. Maybe they are exhausted around the clock.”

Dr. Roberts said that among his recent overtrained patients was a young man who was a stellar Nordic skier. A year and a half later, in marched another: the man’s mother, a middle-aged woman, also a prize-winning Nordic skier.

“They both trained too hard,” Dr. Roberts said. Both, he added, “were more or less self-coached at the time.” No one was monitoring them.

“Athletes are obsessed and gullible,” Dr. Keteyian said. “They will do anything they can to improve their performance and they don’t know when to stop.”

Dr. Roberts suggested that athletes who feel tired all the time first take some time off from their sport, perhaps a few days to two weeks. If they still do not feel better, they should see their primary-care doctor and mention that they are concerned about overtraining. Or, he said, they might want to seek out a physician who specializes in sports medicine — a list is available on acsm.org.

“An athlete would want to look for a physician who practices the broader scope of sports medicine and has not limited his or her practice to musculoskeletal problems,” Dr. Roberts added.

As for Dr. Kraus, he told his son to take a two-week break. That did not help. He had the youth tested for ferritin, an iron storage protein. Overtrained athletes can have low iron levels and anemia, although overtraining is not the only cause.

But even though Erik’s ferritin levels were sub par, and even though they rose slightly when he took iron supplements, he felt as tired and sluggish as ever. In the end, Erik Kraus ended up taking two months off. It was not easy. Like other athletes, he wanted to train, wanted to race, and he worried that he would never be competitive again. Now, finally, he has returned to running.

“When he first started back, he said, ‘Oh, my gosh, this feels good,’ ” Dr. Kraus recalled. Then Erik went for an eight-mile run with the fastest runner on his team. He not only kept up with his teammate but pushed him at the end.

Erik returned home from that run all smiles. “He said, ‘Dad, I had a breakthrough today,’ ” Dr. Kraus said.

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Government toxicologists have reiterated safety concerns about a chemical used in baby bottles and food containers, just weeks after the Food and Drug Administration declared the substance safe.

A report issued Wednesday said there is "some concern" that bisphenol A can cause developmental problems in the brain and hormonal systems of infants and children.

The conclusion from the National Toxicology Program repeats initial findings issued in April. The group -- which includes scientists from the National Institutes of Health and other agencies -- said bisphenol's risks to humans cannot be ruled out, but acknowledged its concerns are based on the findings of studies on animals.

The American Chemistry Council, which represents plastics manufacturers, stressed that studies from animals provide "limited and inconclusive evidence." The group has spent the last year defending the safety of bisphenol from new concerns about the risks of plastics to children.

Bisphenol is a plastic-hardening chemical used to seal canned food and make baby bottles. After more than a year of complaints from consumer and parent groups, the FDA has agreed to revisit the chemical's safety. The agency last month said the trace amounts that leach out of food containers are not a threat to children or adults.

But the toxicology group said that may not be true.

"More research is clearly needed to understand exactly how these findings relate to human health and development," said Michael Shelby, who directed the group's report. "But at this point we can't dismiss the possibility that the effects we're seeing in animals may occur in humans."

The FDA said it would consider the new report as it continues reviewing bisphenol. The agency has scheduled a meeting later this month where its outside advisers will weigh in on the chemical's safety. A final report is expected later in the year.

The toxicology group did back away from one issue raised in its draft report. While the group said in April there was "some concern" the chemical could speed up puberty in girls, the final report states there is now only "minimal concern" about those risks.

The National Toxicology Program ranks its conclusions about chemical risks on a five-tiered scale ranging from "negligible concern" to "serious concern."

Shelby said it is too early to recommend changes in what consumers buy and eat, but he added that parents who are concerned can avoid buying food containers made from bisphenol.

Several major retailers -- including Wal-Mart Stores Inc. and Toys "R" Us Inc. -- have said they would stop selling baby bottles made with the chemical next year. And smaller companies like Eveflo and BornFree have ramped up production of glass baby bottles as a bisphenol-free alternative.

Canada has said it intends to ban the use of the chemical in baby bottles, and state and federal lawmakers have introduced legislation to ban bisphenol in U.S. children's products.

More than 6 billion pounds of bisphenol are produced in the U.S. each year by Dow Chemical, Bayer AG and other manufacturers.

ScienceDaily (Sep. 4, 2008) — A new study has found that mothers who delivered vaginally compared to caesarean section delivery (CSD) were significantly more responsive to the cry of their own baby, identified through MRI brain scans two to four weeks after delivery.

The results of the study, to be published today in The Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, suggest that vaginal delivery (VD) mothers are more sensitive to own baby-cry in the regions of the brain that are believed to regulate emotions, motivation and habitual behaviours.

CSD is a surgical procedure, in which delivery occurs via incisions in the abdominal and uterine wall. It is considered necessary under some conditions to protect the health or survival of infant or mother, but it is controversially linked with postpartum depression. In the US the occurrence of CSD has increased steeply from 4.5% of all deliveries in 1965 to a recent high in 2006 of 29.1%.

The critical capacity of adults to develop the thoughts and behaviours needed for parents to care successfully for their newborn infants is supported by specific brain circuits and a range of hormones. The experience of childbirth by VD compared with CSD uniquely involves the pulsatile release of oxytocin from the posterior pituitary, uterine contractions and vagino-cervical stimulation. Oxytocin is a key mediator of maternal behaviour in animals.

"We wondered which brain areas would be less active in parents who delivered by caesarean section, given that this mode of delivery has been associated with decreased maternal behaviours in animal models, and a trend for increased postpartum depression in humans," said lead author Dr. James Swain, Child Study Centre, Yale University. "Our results support the theory that variations in delivery conditions such as with caesarean section, which alters the neurohormonal experiences of childbirth, might decrease the responsiveness of the human maternal brain in the early postpartum."

The researchers also looked into the brain areas affected by delivery conditions and found relationships between brain activity and measures of mood suggesting that some of the same brain regions may help regulate postpartum mood.

"As more women opt to wait until they are older to have children, and by association be more likely to have a caesarean section delivery, these results are important because they could provide better understanding of the basic neurophysiology and psychology of parent-infant attachment," said Swain. "This work could lead to early detection of families at risk for postpartum depression and attachment problems and form a model for testing interventions."

Fabrizio Costantini for The New York Times

Fabrizio Costantini for The New York Times

 

By LYNNLEY BROWNING

 

Every day more than 4,500 people call Hope Now, the White House-backed group formed to help struggling homeowners.

But few of them appear to be getting the relief they are hoping for. One reason is that the financial powers behind Hope Now — mortgage lenders, loan servicers and big investors — are reluctant to change loan terms substantially if doing so hurts them.

Almost six months after Hope Now was created, the group is largely resisting calls for broad relief for homeowners. In Washington, a furious debate is under way over whether to help homeowners on the brink of default, and several possible plans are starting to coalesce.

But Hope Now, which President Bush has held up as a crucial tool to fight foreclosures, is coming under fire from within and without, accused of putting the interests of lenders over those of borrowers.

Hope Now says it is succeeding. The group, which also includes nonprofit organizations that advise people on managing their debts, says it has helped more than a million people avoid foreclosure.

But Hope Now does not disclose details about how the loan modifications and payment plans it ostensibly helps to broker actually help homeowners. Many people merely get the chance to catch up on late payments.

Even Hope Now says it is unsure how effective it is. The group does not break out the number of loan workouts that occur as a result of its efforts and those that might have happened anyway. Some people who work with Hope Now say it has done little to keep the housing crisis from deepening.

“Hope Now is a failure,” said Michael Shea, the executive director of the Acorn Housing Corporation, a large counseling agency that is part of the Hope Now alliance. “It’s industry-dominated.”

Hope Now is run out of the Housing Policy Council, which in turn is part of the Financial Services Roundtable, the influential financial services lobby.

William A. Longbrake, the vice chairman of Washington Mutual, the big savings and loan, is a senior policy adviser to the roundtable. He said he has “indirect, inferential evidence” that Hope Now is helping.

But the group itself employs just three people. Most of its work is done through committees staffed by senior bank and mortgage executives who are part of the Financial Services Roundtable. Hope Now’s executive director, Faith Schwartz, is an executive at the subprime lender Option One Mortgage.

People who dial Hope Now’s toll-free number, 1-888-995-HOPE, typically are routed to call centers in Phoenix and Spokane, Wash. Three out of four eventually are connected to credit counselors for a free, informal consultation.

But only a fraction of all callers — about 4 percent — ends up talking in person with a housing counselor, according to the Homeownership Preservation Foundation, a nonprofit group at the center of Hope Now that also has ties to the mortgage industry.

Ms. Schwartz defended the group’s work. She said Hope Now is “leveraging existing infrastructure” to help homeowners.

Kenneth Goodman, a homeowner in Fontana, Calif,. said he did not have a good experience trying to get help through Hope Now.

Mr. Goodman, 53, said he had called Hope Now three times in recent months because he was struggling to pay the mortgage on his two-story tract home. The first time he was referred to a mortgage escrow company. The second time, “I got someone oblivious to everything,” he said. The third time the counselor told Mr. Goodman that he had a choice: Sell his home for less than the value of his mortgage, or face immediate foreclosure.

“It was all unhelpful,” Mr. Goodman said. He worries that he will lose his home.

There are Hope Now success stories, but the group declined to point to any.

During a tour of a Hope Now counseling agency last Friday, President Bush cited the case of Danny Cerchiaro, a movie producer. Through Hope Now and a counselor that he called "the magic lady," Mr. Bush said, Mr. Cerchiaro was able to refinance the adjustable-rate mortgage on his home in Iselin, N.J., at a more affordable rate.

But the Financial Services Roundtable and another big industry group behind Hope Now, the American Securitization Forum, oppose any government housing effort that would require them to take losses on bad mortgage loans.

“We support the broad objectives of the alliance,” said George Miller, the executive director of the American Securitization Forum, which represents financial companies involved in bundling mortgages into securities for sale to investors. “But we represent the interests of investors, and we want to minimize losses on bad mortgages and maximize recovery.”

Hope Now counselors are urged to follow the securitization group’s guidelines on loan modifications, which advise lenders to modify loans case by case rather than across the board. Both the forum and the roundtable oppose calls to open up bankruptcy courts for struggling homeowners, a move that could lead to further losses for their members.

The Homeownership Preservation Foundation, for its part, says little about that part of the mortgage market where all the trouble began: subprime loans. According to a fact sheet from the foundation, which was established in 2003, with a $20 million grant from GMAC-RFC, a lender, foreclosures typically result from “medical issues or abrupt changes in income and expenses.”

The sheet does not mention subprime mortgages. The foundation’s seven-member board includes Sandor E. Samuels, the chief legal officer of Countrywide Financial, the mortgage giant that has come to symbolize many of the excesses of subprime lending.

Colleen Hernandez, the executive director of Homeownership Preservation Foundation, called her organization “a hybrid of corporate and nonprofit cultures.” She said the foundation’s 10 affiliated credit counselors working with Hope Now have special training in default counseling. But such counselors typically provide only generic financial planning advice. Housing counselors, by contrast, negotiate with lenders to reduce a borrower’s mortgage.

The credit counselors “don’t say, here’s my recommendation, let’s call the servicer and insist on that option,” Ms. Hernandez said.

In some cases, she said, servicers and banks listen in on the calls between homeowners and the counselors with the knowledge of the homeowners.

Under a deal set to expire in June, the foundation bills the mortgage servicers $100 for each session, then transfers that money to the appropriate credit counseling agency.

Ms. Hernandez said the foundation also hoped to get paid for the calls that do not go beyond the initial call centers. “It has value to the servicers and banks,” she said.

The American Securitization Forum, for its part, has said that “in some instances” its members will pay for the counseling fees.

Ms. Hernandez said that callers typically wait less than 30 seconds to be connected to a call-center operator. But on Monday evening, a reporter who called Hope Now was kept on hold for 50 minutes before hanging up. During that time, a recorded message urged the caller to “start an online counseling session” at hopenow.com.

In recent weeks, Hope Now has had trouble explaining its mission on that Web site. In mid-March, a link on the site inadvertently directed people to a Florida company that sells foreclosed properties.

The Home Preservation Foundation is considering venturing into foreclosed property itself, a move that might strike hard-pressed homeowners as odd given its name and its role in Hope Now.

 

By MICKEY MEECE

 

Glenn Okun, clinical professor of management and entrepreneurship at Stern School of Business at New York University, says that owners should view their business as if they were a prospective outside investor. He outlines six steps to a thorough analysis of a venture:

¶Assess the attractive, or opportune, elements of the venture.

¶Identify the risks of the business.

¶Select the most attractive opportunities to pursue.

¶Decide which risks must be dealt with, given the likelihood of their threat and the extent of their impact.

¶Determine the resources that will be required to exploit the opportunities and manage the risks.

¶Estimate the value that will be created through the expenditure of resources. Plans that result in incremental shareholder value should be considered.

Entrepreneurs must remember, he said, that resources have costs that must be borne by the firm. Financial costs include interest and the dilution of ownership. Financing terms may also constrain the entrepreneur’s flexibility in managing the firm.

Renee Richmond in the parking lot of her employer, Vurv, in Jacksonville, Fla. The company bought Richmond and another employee reliable used cars instead of hiring two new employees when the company moved to other side of Jacksonville.

A SMALL company in Jacksonville, Fla., came up with a novel — and sensitive — solution when two crucial employees had trouble making the commute to its new headquarters across town.

As Derek Mercer, the founder and chief executive of the company, Vurv Technology, tells it, the employees’ supervisor came to him with the suggestion that the company buy two good used cars and give them to the workers outright.

Mr. Mercer said he agreed, and immediately approved the $5,000 expenditure for each car.

Seven years later, the two employees, Tim Gunter and Renee Richmond, are still with Vurv, a developer of human resources software. The company itself has grown from about two dozen employees in those days to about 300 and is now in yet another building.

In looking at the alternative, Mr. Mercer said, it would have cost the company more than the nearly $10,000 it paid for the automobiles to find and train replacements, not to mention the ground it would have lost with customers.

“I felt that they were good employees and responsive to the customers,” Mr. Mercer said, and thus a valuable asset to the company.

Mr. Gunter, who helped clients with software issues, said he was barely six months on the job at Vurv when the family car broke down. He had to ask a neighbor for a ride to work that day, and he feared his new job was at risk.

That same day, Vurv bought him the used car.

“It wasn’t the nicest car,” he said. “It wasn’t the prettiest car. It wasn’t fresh off the lot with new-car smell. But boy, did my overwhelming feeling of dread go from that to enlightenment. This is what this company is about. This is what Derek is about.”

At that point, Mr. Gunter said: “I was just hooked. The 80-hour weeks we worked after that never meant anything. It was give and take. I was giving and the company was definitely giving back.”

Ms. Richmond, who helped companies deploy Vurv’s software, was a single mother of two in 2000. Her Chevrolet Cavalier, with 270,000 miles on it, “finally took its last breath,” she recalled. “I lived 45 miles away from the office, so I had quite a hike back and forth.”

Her supervisor, who is no longer with the company, and Mr. Mercer knew of her troubles, she said, and at her annual evaluation offered to buy her a car instead of giving her a $3,000 raise. They also helped her find the right car, a Diamanti, and paid $4,500 for it, she said. She told them to work out an installment so she could pay the difference. They never did.

And then she got a second pleasant surprise: her raise started showing up in her paycheck as well.

“A company that takes care of their employees,” Ms. Richmond said, “it definitely is returned to them tenfold because their employees are going to take care of them and do a good job.”

Creativity and sensitivity meshed with good business sense at Vurv, and that is a crucial aspect of problem solving, according to Glenn Okun, clinical professor of management and entrepreneurship at the Stern School of Business at New York University. “Entrepreneurs must remember that resources have costs that must be borne by the firm,” he said.

Small-business owners should approach such instances analytically, Professor Okun said, examining risk and opportunity. Act as if you are a third party interested in financing your own company, he suggested, and then decide how to proceed.

Especially now, when economic times are tough, Professor Okun said, business owners will have to weigh unexpected outlays against the knowledge there will be potentially less revenue coming in and less credit extended by lenders and investors to smooth rough patches. In this environment, he said, “problems get magnified, even if the firm is solid.”

The solution at Vurv was a balancing act of trying to help employees while not hurting the bottom line.

The same was true for the Transtec Group in Austin, Tex., which helps public and private agencies in street, highway, airfield and seaport projects. Dan K. Rozycki, its president, recalled what happened when an employee had to get out of her apartment after a relationship broke up. “In a matter of days,” Mr. Rozycki said, “we helped her find a new apartment and we furnished the whole place from sofa to spatula.”

The company has done so many things for employees, he said, that “it’s hard to remember stuff we’ve done over the years.”

“When you’re small and flexible and put co-workers first,” he said, “stuff just happens, but nobody records it or thinks it’s that shocking.”

When another employee had serious personal problems, he said, the company offered and paid for the professional therapy.

And when a new employee from China needed to learn how to drive, colleagues took him for driving lessons and helped him shop for a car.

In addition, he said, over the years, the company has learned how to avoid common pitfalls that could fester as problems. Asking for raises is often tricky for employees and employers, Mr. Rozycki said, “so we give out raises every Jan. 1 to everyone.” No one has complained in the last seven years, he said.

As to industry conferences, he said, the company decided to invite every one rather than select a few so that no one felt left out.

“What it really comes down to,” he said, “is we’re trying to create the ultimate workplace. We believe you can do the right thing and be profitable.”