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Don’t Teach Your Kids to Fear the World
If you are a parent, your greatest fear in life is likely something happening to one of your kids. According to one 2018 poll from OnePoll and the Lice Clinics of America (not my usual data source, but no one else seems to measure this), parents spend an average of 37 hours a week worrying about their children; the No. 1 back-to-school concern is about their safety. And this makes sense, if you believe that safety is a foundation that has to be established before dealing with other concerns. You can see the effects of all this worrying in modern parenting behavior.
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Educators Can Help Make Stem Fields Diverse – Over 25 Years, I’ve Identified Nudges That Can Encourage Students to Stay
Jen, a student I taught early in my career, stood head-and-shoulders above her peers academically. I learned she had started off as an engineering major but switched over to psychology. I was surprised and curious. Was she struggling with difficult classes? No. In fact, Jen’s aptitude for math was so strong, she had been recruited as an engineering prospect. In her first year, her engineering classes were filled with faces of other women. But as she advanced, there were fewer and fewer women in her classes – until one day, she realized she was the only woman in a large lecture class of men. Jen began to question if she belonged.
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Go Ahead, Ask For Help. People Are Happy to Give It.
Many things can get in the way of asking others for help: Fear of rejection. Fear of imposing. The pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps mythology so ingrained in American culture. But new research suggests many of us underestimate how willing — even happy! — others are to lend a helping hand. The study, published in the journal Psychological Science this month, included six small experiments involving more than 2,000 participants — all designed to compare the perspectives of those asking for help with the perspectives of helpers.
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Changing Perceptions About Harm Can Temper Moral Outrage
Comprehensive sex education works. Years of research show that it is much more effective than an abstinence-only approach at preventing teen pregnancy. In fact, abstinence-only programs may actually increase unplanned pregnancies and can contribute to harmful shaming and sexist attitudes. Yet abstinence, or “sexual risk avoidance,” programs persist in the U.S. Why? Ultimately many people believe that teenagers should not have sex. If adolescents just abstain, they reason, unplanned pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases will no longer be a problem.
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A Shortcut for Feeling Just a Little Happier
Lately, my back has been hurting. I did something weird in the gym, resulting in a dull ache, and now I’m taking it easy. I appreciate the feedback the pain provides, because I would like to be able to walk upright for a few more decades and don’t want to risk a more permanent injury. Still, I don’t enjoy it, so I’ve been taking acetaminophen to blunt my discomfort. Back pain is normal, but a different sort of hurt is even more typical in my life, and probably yours as well: mental suffering.
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Kids’ Mental Health Is a ‘National Emergency.’ Therapists Are in Short Supply.
At the beginning of the year, I started hearing from readers across the country that there were long waiting lists for child and adolescent mental health providers. Many of their kids were really struggling, often with anxiety and depression. When these parents tried to find help, they found there was, in some cases, up to a six-month wait to even get in the door at a therapist’s office for an assessment. This shortage is not just anecdotal, and in some places it existed before the pandemic produced so much suffering that the American Academy of Pediatrics declared child and adolescent mental health a “national emergency” back in October.