Parents

Brad Bushman, professor of communication and psychology at Ohio State University, told Time, “Our research provides the first empirical evidence that parents sometimes want their child to fulfill their unfulfilled ambitions — for example, that they want their child to become a physician when they themselves were rejected for medical school.” Pushy parents seem to share a common trait: They view their children as part of themselves. Those…

Perhaps it has always been this way, but recently it seems that parents are under attack. The criticisms come from all sides. They are over-involved or overly permissive. They fail to teach traditions and values. They over-diagnose, over-medicate, and over-accommodate our kids, often to excuse their own poor parenting. Especially, the critics believe, their children are indulged. Like curling athletes, they try to smooth their…

Have you ever walked into a room, stared at the wall and forgot why you went in there? What failed you was your working memory. You were supposed to store the plan of what you were going to do next in your working memory until you retrieved that pencil or glass of juice. We all differ in the amount of information that we can keep in…

Here’s the summary of what seemed to be the bigger findings to emerge about ‘bringing up baby’ in 2012. No. 1: As freedom wanes in children, so does creativity According to Kyung Hee Kim, a professor at the College of William and Mary, all aspects of creativity are in decline for kids, the biggest being in the measure called Creative Elaboration – which assesses the ability to…

The capacity to notice the distress of others, and to be moved by it, can be a critical component of what is called prosocial behavior, actions that benefit others: individuals, groups or society as a whole. Dr. Eisenberg, a professor of psychology at Arizona State University, draws a distinction between empathy and sympathy: Empathy is experiencing the same emotion or highly similar emotion to what the other…

With more and more young people waiting until their late 30s and early 40s to start their families. As Shulevitz points out, one in three female college graduates in the US waits until after age 30 to have her first child, while for women without a degree that number is just one in ten. The negative aspect of delaying parenthood Delaying can wreak havoc with the…