Raising Happy and Successful Kids

Baylor University's student newspaper, The Lariat, recently revealed that the school has paid already-admitted freshmen to retake the SAT. The program raised average test scores for incoming freshmen, and therefore could help the school’s US News & World Report ranking. Faculty, who hadn't known about this latest example of the misuse of testing in  Read More 

There's a very good article on kids and competition in the Oct. 17th Family Circle, also on Parents.com. Cynthia Hanson writes that kids' lives are more competitive these days partly because of TV shows like American Idol, and America's Next Top Model. "We have a whole generation of kids who fear they're going  Read More 

Conventional wisdom has it that we shouldn't bail our kids out of sticky situations or failures, because then they won't learn from their mistakes. You might think that since I've coauthored a book on pressured parents and warned acting on the anxiety we feel when our kids compete, that I'd say "Hold off. Let  Read More 

Not long ago Wendy Grolnick and I published an oped in the L.A. Times titled, “Pay to Learn Shortchanges Kids: dozens of studies over 35 years have found that rewarding people for learning backfires.” You can see it at
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-grolnick5-2008sep05,0,2652576.story

Paying kids to learn is not  Read More