One parent I know pushed her child hard to punch all his tickets in high school. He was a smart kid, but lazy. She felt she had to manage him…
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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…
I once had a conversation with an intelligent woman about the value of team sports. She said emphatically that the idea that team sports promoted teen development was utter nonsense…
For years now, instead of saying “Drive safely!” when people I care about are getting into their cars, I tell them, “Watch out for the crazies!” I know, it sounds…
A friend once told me a story about his older brother. My friend was a top student and multi-sport athlete in high school, and he eventually got a football scholarship…
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…
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…
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…
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?…
Why would a teenager do something as stupid as engaging in one of the teen challenges, such as binge-drinking, or swallowing a spoonful of cinnamon, or snorting a condom. Quite…
The surveys and statistics bear it out: teens are misusing drugs and alcohol at younger and younger ages. Parents are often unaware that it’s begun, since the warning signs can…
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…
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…
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…
I recently streamed the movie, About Sunny, starring Lauren Ambrose, an accomplished but relatively unknown young actress. Whenever a movie is excellent in every way and I want Netflix to…
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: under-age smoking…
When they’re little you read to them, hoping they’ll learn to love books and reading and learning. Before you know it they’re in school, beginning a learning journey that will…
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 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…
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…
Whenever I think about positive self-esteem and its importance to the achievement, mental health, and happiness of young people, I think of how perilous a life journey can be. And I…
I’ve written two books, Conversations with the Wise Uncle (for boys) and Conversations with the Wise Aunt (for girls) that are fictional accounts about an older relative mentoring a young person during the teen…
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…
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…
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,…