Kindle edition of Welcome to Your Child's Brain

Some of you have been asking about the Kindle version of our new book. It was bit slow getting here, but it's now available. So if you want the book right this minute, we're pleased to announce that you can get it.

Appearance at Kepler's Books in Menlo Park

Northern California folks, please join me at Kepler's tomorrow (Tuesday the 27th) for a discussion of children's brains. I'll talk about what you can do to improve your child's self-control and other building blocks of success in adulthood. Also, how people are like crabgrass - and why that's a good thing!

NYT: Delay Kindergarten At Your Child's Peril

In the US, one in 11 kindergarteners have been held back a year compared with when they should have begun school. In today's New York Times, Sandra and I have an article on this practice, called redshirting, and the fact that it brings very little lasting benefit for a child.

If you are interested in our literature sources, an annotated version can be found here (Word document) and here (PDF).

Saturday morning on Fox and Friends

Tomorrow (Saturday) around 7:45am, Sam will be on Fox and Friends to talk about how children's brains are active learners, and that for their healthy development, parents should relax...

P.S. Here's a link to the video.

Children's brains are active learners

Baby Einstein doesn't work. Drama class teaches kids empathy. You can teach a kid willpower. What's the common theme? Children's brains are active learners. I discuss all this in two minutes flat with Shelley Goldberg on NY1.

Five myths about your child's brain

In today's New York Post, Sandra and I reveal five myths about children's brains - and replace them with useful facts.

Is failure the key to success?

Here's an interesting article in this weekend's New York Times Magazine about the efforts of two school administrators to promote the development of nonacademic skills, including self-control, social intelligence, and persistence. As Sam and I discuss in the book, these sorts of abilities are stronger predictors of success in life than IQ - and parents can do a lot to encourage their development. It's great to see schools starting to work toward the same goal.

Listen to us on Fresh Air - Wednesday Sept. 14

Tomorrow, Sandra and I will go on air with Terry Gross on NPR's Fresh Air about Welcome To Your Child's Brain. It was a fun interview - listen!

Instilling self-discipline...without Tiger Parenting

Over at BigThink, Jason Gots writes about a theme in an interview I did with them: "tiger parenting." The publication of Amy Chua’s 2010 book Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother unleashed a parental firestorm in the form of a conflict between different ideas about parenting -- one promoting children’s self-esteem, the other prioritizing self-discipline.

As Sandra and I have pointed out in Welcome To Your Child's Brain, self-esteem for its own sake is overrated. But is Chua's approach the only way to build a key capacity in your child? The answer is no. Read on...