You see those beautiful eyes and that heart-melting smile. What you don't see (and probably rarely think about) is what's going on in your child's brain, which is steadily growing, preparing itself for the challenges of adult life, and will continue to do so until...
How could viewing over 25 paintings by early San Antonio artist Julian Onderdonk make me think of video game addiction? It happened. The San Antonio Museum of Art recently featured the collection of Onderdonk, an American impressionist painter who died in 1922 at the...
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 materials to the placenta, which nurtures the growing fetus. If the mother...
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 residency in psychiatry in 1989. He was a postgraduate fellow in the...
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 time I was thinking that a lot of unused brain cell connections were in the process of being "pruned" from his...
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 and drinking; drug abuse and addiction; low self-esteem and peer pressure; self-harm and...
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 foundation for critical thinking. To this end, I've written a number of posts...
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 of the most important information a teen can have. Nevertheless, imagine a young teenage girl having lunch...
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 it" blossoming and pruning process on the way to establishing an individual's foundation for critical...
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, walking, or talking - is "wired." The human brain's way of wiring itself is...