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…
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You don’t want your teen to smoke cigarettes. You don’t want your teen smoke marijuana. There’s the danger that normal development of the prefrontal cortex will be disrupted, with permanent…
First, here’s what I mean by “smart.” One long-accepted understanding of “smart” involves acquiring knowledge: learning facts and basic principles. This is the primary business of middle school and high…
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…
Not long ago, I had a conversation with a local physician. Happily, we didn’t talk about my health. Instead, he spoke enthusiastically about his three children, two boys and a…
What’s happening as an adolescent child matures toward adulthood is complicated, so it’s important to know what’s going on. But when parents are given insightful information, their first question 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…
Here’s the overview: Over a dozen basic foundation thinking skills need to be wired during adolescence. Lots of repetitions are needed to establish skill circuits in the brain. This happens…
In my new book, How Your Teen Can Grow a Smarter Brain, I explain that adolescence is a sensitive time window for developing foundation thinking skills in the prefrontal cortex…
Recently I stood gazing out a street-facing window of a restaurant. A couple sat at an outdoor table on the sidewalk. Both were busy interacting with their smartphones. Across the…
Every parent I’ve ever met hopes their teen will grow up to be a capable, successful adult, even though we all have seen instances of the opposite. Realistically, wonderful things…
I recently had a conversation with a local physician. Happily, we didn’t talk about my health. Instead, he spoke enthusiastically about his three children, two boys and a girl, all…
It happens on a regular basis. Someone you know – a friend, a spouse, a child, a co-worker – will come to you frustrated because he’s having problems. If you’re…
People sometimes ask me, “What’s your favorite book about parenting?” It’s a good question, because there are hundreds of parenting books to choose from. But for me, it’s not a…
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…
First, a new word: “esports.” Makes you think that playing video games is a legitimate sport, something like poker, which is featured on ESPN and in the sports sections of…
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…
In my posts, “Video Game Addiction and Brain Damage” and “Teen Smartphones and Social Networking – Buyer Beware” I described potential threats to normal teen brain development. If you read these…
One of the underlying themes of my writing is that parents of teens need to be realistic. But being realistic doesn’t necessarily imply some kind of worst-case scenario. Because realistically,…
About the teen brain, I have some good news and some bad news. First, the good news. Nearly every adult I talk to these days has heard about the teen brain. Fifteen…
I recently had a fascinating discussion about the adolescent brain with parent coach Andrea Zacharias. If you want to know more about what I do and think about every day,…
What is self-esteem, anyway? Why is it important to a growing child? Why does it turn out to be a tough issue? What can parents do to nurture stronger self-esteem?…
Today, most phone calls are made using wireless smartphones, relayed by Wi-Fi devices in your home or distant radio towers. What we used to call telephones are now called landlines,…
If you’ve read about the teen brain, you know it’s mostly about a child’s final stage of brain development, during which the prefrontal cortex (PFC) is wired for foundation critical…
Parenting Fundamentals 1-5 were presented in Part One. Here are 6-10: 6. Help your child build a strong work ethic. When I was 15 I mowed my aunt’s lawn with…
A few years ago I wrote a book for middle school boys, called Conversations with the Wise Uncle. I then wrote a similar book for young girls. My purpose was…
If you read news articles, you know that it’s not uncommon to read about murder. I learn about such incidents all too often; I reflect on the loss of life,…
I stood under the front entrance canopy of the H.E.B. grocery store as I watched cold rain pouring onto the parking lot. Slowly moving toward me was a young woman…
I recently spoke with a mother of three boys, ages 11, 13 and 15. She told me she and her husband plan to give all three sons video game consoles…
Doctors routinely warn women to avoid smoking and using alcohol or drugs during pregnancy. Why? Because the unborn child’s body and brain are slowly developing, and the mother’s blood provides…
So much of what I write about has to do with adolescent kids and how parents can take maximum advantage of this precious time. Along the way I’ve come to…
Since the 1990’s, when Dr. Jay Giedd and his colleagues at the National Institute for Mental Health published their pioneering research about adolescent brain development, more than a dozen authors…
It was the summer of 1960, and I was 15. Elvis’ active duty service in the Army was behind him, and John Kennedy was running for President. My father, a…
In a separate post, I quoted Dr. Jay Giedd, the pioneering brain researcher who discovered that the prefrontal cortex (PFC) is still under development during a child’s adolescence, that this is…
For readers who are unfamiliar with Dr. Jay Giedd’s work, he entered the Residency Program at the Menninger School of Psychiatry, transferred to the Barrow Neurological Institute and completed his…
When your child gets involved in an activity, it will probably involve learning certain skills. Home/life skills? Relationship skills? Athletic? Musical? Artistic? Mechanical? Construction? Academic? Thinking? Managing? If some of…
Kids learn better when movement and exercise are a part of their day. This guest post comes to us from Lizzy Bullock, writer and swim instructor for AquaGear. Children in…
I have a 15-year-old nephew. The last time I saw him he was doing what most kids his age are doing: sitting on a couch browsing his smartphone. At the…
I’ve written extensively about the development of the prefrontal cortex (PFC) during adolescence. At puberty, a child’s PFC undergoes a “second blooming,” which begins a roughly 12-year period of development….
I’ve posted before about the importance of critical thinking and the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for a young person to lay down a foundation of critical thinking skills in the developing prefrontal cortex…
Dad lets his son borrow the car. “Be sure to have it back by six. I’ve got an important place to be tonight.” “No problem, Dad.” Six o’clock comes and…
During the first few months of life, parents show lots of colorful, noise-making objects to their infant. Slowly, the baby learns to pay attention. The child is doing the work to program the neural…
Most of the 50 million parents of school-aged children in the U.S. are all too aware of the gauntlet of dangers that threaten when a child becomes an adolescent:Â under-age smoking…
These days, parents hear a lot about the “teen brain” in the popular media. The message is that the “prefrontal cortex” (PFC), the area of the brain in charge of…
In this piece, I reference an interesting video. Even though you may find it shocking, watch it all the way through. Don’t click off just because you think it’s disgusting….
One of the most important aspects of adolescent development is what experts refer to as the “teen brain.” And the big issue with the teen brain is the development of…
In my book, How Your Teen Can Grow a Smarter Brain, I describe as simply as possible something of utmost importance: the part of the brain that makes a human…
IF (1) you have an adolescent child or one who is soon to reach puberty, and (2) you’re a conscious parent who is looking for wisdom and guidance to avoid the…
Kids can learn a lot from experience. But that doesn’t mean they will, just because something happened to them. Most of the time young people go from one life event to another without learning…
One crucial step in helping your adolescent child build a superior mind is to protect the prefrontal cortex (PFC) from damage during adolescence – the developmental period for wiring the…
In 2014Â a huge tornado devastated a small town in Oklahoma, killing 24 people. Stories and images of the destruction were all over the Internet, the newspapers and television news. The…
Two decades ago, Michael Gurian’s best-selling book, The Wonder of Boys, created a stir. The push for women’s rights assumed the developmental needs of both genders were the same. Going against this assumption, he…
FASD stands for fetal alcohol spectrum disorder: a variety of permanent birth defects caused by the mother’s consumption of alcohol during pregnancy. The mother consumes alcohol, the substance travels to…
Often when I write about adolescence, I make reference to a part of the brain called the prefrontal cortex. To help you appreciate where that part of the brain is…
I accidentally help wire my boys’ teen brain for critical thinking. It was Christmas 1982, and like all parents at the time, I knew nothing about the teen brain. But…
Every time a teenager tries to figure out why something happened, tries to understand the relationship between thing A and thing B, tries to see the connection between cause and…
Drinking alcohol with the expressed purpose of getting “messed up”? Believe it or not, this is an activity practiced mostly by kids. Watch this brief video… What can a parent…
Most parents think of their child as “officially” an adolescent when they technically become a teenager on their 13th birthday. And they think their project of raising the child to…
When I was in high school, I got an A in every subject I ever took. I didn’t find out until later that I hadn’t learned as much as I…
A new study has concluded that teenagers who smoke pot suffer a significant drop in IQ that persists even if they stop smoking it later in life. The article doesn’t…
If you’ve followed my blog, you know I often write about adolescence as the sensitive time of life during which a child’s prefrontal cortex can be wired for basic critical thinking…
I consider myself a serious thinker. But to be honest, I’m not an intellectual. I’m biased towards action. I have a Ph.D., but 95% of what I know today I…
Not long ago I was sitting at a table drinking coffee and talking with Johann Eyfells, the world-famous Icelandic sculptor. At some point, I used the word “luck.” He quickly…
Most mornings it’s still dark when I leave my driveway to head to the gym. Often during the school year as I pass a certain intersection, I see a car with…
I have a friend whose dad had a personal library of several thousand books. When my friend was about ten years old, his dad enrolled him in a speed-reading course….
A few years ago, I had a reunion with some old high school buddies that I hadn’t seen in nearly 50 years. It was an amazing experience and a lot…
I’m just guessing, but it may be true that no teenager in the long history of planet Earth has ever been given “the brain talk,” even though it’s probably some…
Adolescence is a perilous time. This is the period from about age 10 until the early 20s when the prefrontal cortex is going through the critical “use it or lose…
Do you have a teenager in your life? I ask this question a lot these days, because a young person’s developmental experience during the dozen or so years called adolescence…
The human brain has a unique way of developing itself. A child’s brain develops in phases. During each phase, the basic foundation for a particular brain function – such as visual perception,…