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Race to Nowhere
A documentary called Race To Nowhere is making its way around the schools in my neighborhood. The film was made by a mother who was disturbed by the amount of homework that schools were assigning, as she felt her children were focusing too much on homework and not enough on play. This has been a…
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Digital Media Are a Tool
A recent article by James Fallows in the Atlantic reminded me that digital media are a tool and not an entirely new state of being and behavior. The article says: “Technology, to them, is neither a sedative that dulls our alarm nor a rocket ship that will spirit us away from our problems; it is…
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Pre-Maternity Leave Requested!
The upcoming article by Christine Dunkel Schetter outlines a number of difficulties that may negatively impact the infant’s birth weight and duration of the pregnancy. The sources of stressors outlined in the article are broad, including financial stressors, problems in ones romantic relationships, family responsibilities, employment conditions, and pregnancy-related concerns. Both episodic and chronic stressors…
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Raising an academically motivated child
Children who are motivated on their own to do well in school is a dream of almost every parent. Fortunately, whether a child is intrinsically motivated to do well academically is not purely genetic or based on socioeconomic factors. This means that parents can purposefully contribute to the development of academic intrinsic motivation, or AIM…
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Moniker mumbo jumbo
Social psychology research is known for its counterintuitive, surprising, sometimes even “cute” findings. One of the latest findings in this series is that your initials can affect how successful you are; for instance, students whose names start with C or D get worse grades than students whose names start with A or B. Authors Lief…
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Family Assistance Activities Makes for a Happy Adolescent?
Some may believe that encouraging adolescents to engage in family assistance activities (e.g. taking care of younger siblings and performing household chores) may be overly demanding and stressful for them and thus create more family conflicts. Although this can be the case some of the time, a study conducted at the University of California, Los…
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Childhood Sexual Assault: Impacts are broad, but not for all victims?
Psychologists often rely on grouping participants together based on shared characteristics (e.g., are girls better than boy in reading ability). The goal is to broadly understand the relationships between potential causes and effects, and, ideally learn from them. In the first example above, perhaps reading interventions targeting boys may be an effect if the study…
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What do kids really do all day?
Do children really spend less time outdoors or doing sports? Have they stopped reading? Do they only stare at screens all day? The best way to answer this question is to look at what kids actually do all day, and a recent study did just that with a large group of kids, age 6-12. …
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What makes us Happy?
According to Dan Gilbert, the author of Stumbling on Happiness, research indicates that it’s not children. In a recent talk at the APA convention, Dr. Gilbert told the crowd of psychologists and psychiatrists that 20 years of research has shown that people without children are happier than those with children. And people with young children…
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Can Video Games Transform Learning?
A lot of really smart people believe that video games are the key to engaging children in school. The question is can video games really teach useful, transferable subjects? The NY Times magazine just put out an issue discussing this very subject. They profiled a school called Quest to Learn that has a curriculum around…