My book, How Your Teen Can Grow a Smarter Brain, and most of the hundreds of articles on this blog, address how to encourage, support and coach a young person during the adolescent years to wire their prefrontal cortex (PFC) for the thinking skills that they'll need...
I've been a Dad to over a dozen cats in my adult life. The cat in the photo is Cookie, one of the three cats in my family right now. All three display signs of intelligence. I see this in the way they make decisions. For example, at a certain time each afternoon,...
When asked about teen brain development, I'm challenged to boil a huge amount of research down to a few facts. Here's how I explain it: At the onset of puberty, a child's body and brain are flooded with growth hormones. The resulting changes in the body are visible;...
If you like to read, here's a good article from the Stanford Children's Health website about the developing teenage brain. It attempts to explain how teens eventually grow out of thinking emotionally to thinking logically. As the article says, not all teens develop...
It seems like yesterday when I published Conversations with the Wise Uncle: The Secret to Being Strong as a Teenager and Preparing for Success as an Adult (First Summit, 2012). Eight years ago! It's a series of stories about a young boy named Chris and his uncle Ray,...
Imagine this scenario... A well-rounded, accomplished teen boy raised in a wholesome, supportive family is asked by a girl he believes is romantically interested in him, a stranger he met online, to send her erotic photos of himself. The reasoning part of his brain is...
I recently had breakfast with some friends who have a graduating high school senior. He's a great kid who wants to be a speech therapist and has been accepted into the right university for that training. Also, I pointed out that in addition to this wonderful outcome,...
As you may have noticed throughout your life, not every child grows up smart. In this brief article, some straight talk about adolescent brain development. Each area of a child's growing brain has a sensitive window for development. For the kind of adult-level...
As you may have heard, my new book, How Your Teen Can Grow a Smarter Brain, is now available on Amazon. Several people have commented on the title, that "growing a smarter brain" is a clever metaphor for the process of building vital thinking skills. I continue this...
A "feral child" is one who spent a significant part of early childhood isolated from civilization, often raised by wild animals. A consistent theme of these stories is that the foundlings had no language or social skills, which are normally learned early in life, and...