Small states have a significant advantage in the senate.
Tag: nytimes
Raising Successful Children
Madeline Levine writes in the New York Times about the challenge parents face in determining how involved to be in their children’s lives. The problems with helicopter parenting is a suffocated kid. But a child whose parents are too permissive will face their own set of problems. Figuring out the right level of praise and feedback to give a child’s accomplishments is a difficult task. Can calling a kid smart make him dumb?
Tackling more difficult puzzles carries the risk of losing one’s status as “smart” and deprives kids of the thrill of choosing to work simply for its own sake, regardless of outcomes.
The key, it seems, it to make sure the child’s success is his own. Parents can do this by giving appropriate attention to their own success.
Parents also have to make sure their own lives are fulfilling. There is no parent more vulnerable to the excesses of overparenting than an unhappy parent. One of the most important things we do for our children is to present them with a version of adult life that is appealing and worth striving for.
Get another brain by learning another language
Here’s another reason for me to start learning Spanish again.
Being bilingual, it turns out, makes you smarter. It can have a profound effect on your brain, improving cognitive skills not related to language and even shielding against dementia in old age.
The article gives neurological reasons why knowing two languages makes you smarted and keeps your brain healthy. However, the sustained mental effort necessary to learn a second language probably provides the biggest brain boost.
Today’s ideal social form is not the commune or the movement or even the individual creator as such; it’s the small business. Every artistic or moral aspiration — music, food, good works, what have you — is expressed in those terms. Call it Generation Sell.