A study of genetically identical mice is providing some hints about humans. How can one identical twin be a wallflower while the other is the life of the party? The study of 40 young mice found that their behavior grew increasingly different over three months, even though the mice shared the same genes and lived in the same five-level cage, researchers report Thursday in the…
How Can Identical Twin Turn Out So Different?
10 Things We Know About Autism That We Didn’t Know A Year Ago
Just two decades ago, autism was a mysterious and somewhat obscure disorder, commonly associated with the movie Rain Man and savantism. It affected an estimated 1 in 5,000 children. How times have changed. Today, thanks to awareness and advocacy efforts, people now have a much better understanding of autism. The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) now estimates that a staggering 1 in 88 children, including 1 in 54…
Are Modern Parents Too Indulgent? Or Are They Too Stressed?
Perhaps it has always been this way, but recently it seems that parents are under attack. The criticisms come from all sides. They are over-involved or overly permissive. They fail to teach traditions and values. They over-diagnose, over-medicate, and over-accommodate our kids, often to excuse their own poor parenting. Especially, the critics believe, their children are indulged. Like curling athletes, they try to smooth their…
5 Big Discoveries About Parenting in 2012
Here’s the summary of what seemed to be the bigger findings to emerge about ‘bringing up baby’ in 2012. No. 1: As freedom wanes in children, so does creativity According to Kyung Hee Kim, a professor at the College of William and Mary, all aspects of creativity are in decline for kids, the biggest being in the measure called Creative Elaboration – which assesses the ability to…
Understanding How Children Develop Empathy
The capacity to notice the distress of others, and to be moved by it, can be a critical component of what is called prosocial behavior, actions that benefit others: individuals, groups or society as a whole. Dr. Eisenberg, a professor of psychology at Arizona State University, draws a distinction between empathy and sympathy: Empathy is experiencing the same emotion or highly similar emotion to what the other…
Can Parenting Style Impact Your Well-Being
A recent study published in the Journal of Child and Family Studies suggests that it’s not whether we’re parents – but how we parent – that may be an important factor to consider. According to researchers at the University of Mary Washington in Virginia, women who engage in “intensive parenting” are likely to experience negative mental health outcomes like stress and depression. The authors focused on women because they tend to be much more…
My Teen Says All the Other Parents Are Allowing This
My daughter is 14 years old. She was recently invited to a party at a friend’s house. The problem is that I don’t really know the parents or the other kids very well. I am also worried about the level of supervision. The girl throwing the party has older siblings who will probably be there so there will be teens of all ages there which increases the chance…
Tips For Improving Your Teen’s Sleep Schedule
Many parents wrestle with helping their teenagers get enough sleep, especially when high school classes start before dawn. Battling early school start times and teens’ changing body clocks, which pressure them to fall asleep later, can be overwhelming for parents. Few teens want parents setting their bedtimes. Most of the adolescents resisted their parent’s requests to stop texting or Web-surfing late at night. And don’t fall for the…
The Key To Raising Confident Kids
As parents, we believe we’re meant to instill confidence in our children. That building self-esteem is the number one priority of raising, and educating, children, and that regular praising will encourage them to believe in themselves. And if kids believe in themselves, the thinking goes, they will take risks, meet goals, and generally achieve great things. Praise might actually undermine kids’ success Except it turns…
Adolescence and the Teenage Crush
Teenage crushes have a significant role to play in the journey of adolescence. Consider crushes of two kinds – identity crushes and romantic crushes. In both cases, the teenager feels smitten by a compelling person who captivates their attention for good and ill. Identity crushes are formed by finding someone they much admire, want to become like, and treat as a leader or model they are eager to…