With the best of intentions, many parents get into the habit of repressing what they are feeling - bottling up their annoyance and frustration in an attempt to indulge their children's needs, energy, and enthusiasm, or to handle their bad behaviour with grace. While this practice seems noble at first (we all want to set a good example, after all), ...
Parents today are inundated with alarmist headlines alerting them to the myriad supposed dangers of modern life; everything from plastic baby bottles to radiation from cell phones to the preservatives in our food are purported to be cause for concern. In this fearful social climate, it's often difficult to determine what truly poses a risk and which issues have been ...
Many parents are shocked by the idea that one might be able to “test” for creativity; how, they wonder, can such a magical and intangible quality possibly be measured and quantified? The answer, of course, is “imperfectly”, but emerging neuroscientific research has given us a fairly accurate glimpse into both the regions of the brain responsible for producing creative thought ...
Talking to your children about sex is the very archetype of an awkward conversation, so many parents may find themselves tempted to outsource this task to either educators or online search engines. Likewise, they sometimes assume that the latter two resources are superior sources of knowledge anyway, or that they ought not “rush” their child and let him or her ...
As children grow older, their behaviours change dramatically. While a hysterical tantrum over something minor is completely normal at two ...
For parents, even the little white lies that children sometimes tell - e.g., claiming to have completed their homework ...
Every child differs in his/her developmental capacity and pace. Some children learn to speak earlier than others. Some learn ...
In recent years, critical thinking has replaced rote learning as the priority skill in most classrooms; gone are the days when simply regurgitating information regarding historical facts and figures, geography, times tables, etc., was sufficient to be deemed an exemplary student. Instead, today's students are valued as much—or more—for their ability to engage in rational analysis of the ...
It's natural for parents to desire that their children be driven to achieve; given how obsessed our culture has become with rigorous testing and tough competition for college admissions, this capacity for high levels of self-motivation may seem essential to a child's long-term success. What many fail to realize, however, is that when a driven attitude is allowed to progress ...
Most human beings have a tendency to assess things from the outside in, using measurable external factors such as performance and achievement to ascertain how intelligent (or “gifted”) a person is. Indeed, the standardized psychological tests used to detect giftedness entirely overlook the behavioural and emotional aspects of giftedness. This sets up a damaging precedent, one that leads to gifted ...
For the past few months, I am asked almost daily about the new sex education curriculum introduced by Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne and how it is going to affect sexual orientation and gender identity in young children. There is not much research on this topic, most relevant is a six year study of 12000 adolescents conducted by Dr. Ross O'Hara from ...
