Yelling at your kids just makes you a “poster adult” for temper tantrums. Doing this unfortunately also gives your kids the message that you are not in control. It is also crucial to understand that kids feel unsafe when they perceive that their parents have no control. When you yell your children will likely either yell back or act out in some other negative way. As a…
Stop Yelling So Your Kids Can Hear You
Why Parents are Pushy
Brad Bushman, professor of communication and psychology at Ohio State University, told Time, “Our research provides the first empirical evidence that parents sometimes want their child to fulfill their unfulfilled ambitions — for example, that they want their child to become a physician when they themselves were rejected for medical school.” Pushy parents seem to share a common trait: They view their children as part of themselves. Those…
How Can Identical Twin Turn Out So Different?
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…
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…
Working Memory and School Performance
Have you ever walked into a room, stared at the wall and forgot why you went in there? What failed you was your working memory. You were supposed to store the plan of what you were going to do next in your working memory until you retrieved that pencil or glass of juice. We all differ in the amount of information that we can keep in…
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…
How Technology is Changing The Way Children Think and Focus
Thinking. The capacity to reflect, reason, and draw conclusions based on our experiences, knowledge, and insights. It’s what makes us human and has enabled us to communicate, create, build, advance, and become civilized. Thinking encompasses so many aspects of who our children are and what they do, from observing, learning, remembering, questioning, and judging to innovating, arguing, deciding, and acting. There is also little doubt…
Delaying Parenthood May Come At A Cost
With more and more young people waiting until their late 30s and early 40s to start their families. As Shulevitz points out, one in three female college graduates in the US waits until after age 30 to have her first child, while for women without a degree that number is just one in ten. The negative aspect of delaying parenthood Delaying can wreak havoc with the…