“As you simplify your life, the laws of the universe will be simpler; solitude will not be solitude, poverty will not be poverty, nor weakness weakness.” -Henry David Thoreau NEWSFLASH!: The United States gets the gold! We have become the nation with the highest level of anxiety in the world. According to a recent study […]
The Wrong Kind of Praise
“Undeserved praise causes more pangs of conscience later than undeserved blame, but probably only for this reason, that our power of judgment are more completely exposed by being over praised than by being unjustly underestimated.” -Friedrich Nietzsche Although this research about the perils of too much praise on children’s learning is not new, it is so important […]
Raising Stress-Hardy Children
Given that change is an inevitable part of life, it is important to learn how we can increase our capacity to rebound or spring back from change and loss, a concept now called resiliency by social science researchers. Although some aspects of resiliency are inborn, others aspects can be learned and practiced. Two of the pioneers in […]
Confronting the Fear of Change
“I wonder why progress looks so much like destruction.” -John Steinbeck I have loved this quote for thirty years and a few others like it. I think it’s essential to have a touchstone to hold onto during times of rapid and radical change. Given how easy it is, in the face […]
How Exercise Can Help the Brain (and Other Things)
One of the books that we have told many friends and family about is Spark: The Revolutionary Science of Exercise and the Brain by John Ratey and Eric Hagerman. John Ratey, M.D. is a clinical professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and author of numerous bestselling and groundbreaking books, including Driven to Distraction and […]
What Dogs Can Teach Us About Being Human
“Dogs are our link to paradise. They don’t know evil or jealousy or discontent. To sit with a dog on a hillside on a glorious afternoon is to be back in Eden, where doing nothing was not boring–it was peace.” -Milan Kundera You probably don’t need to tell a die-hard dog lover (like me) […]
