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That’s a Wrap. What Did I Miss?
The New York Times: Like most parents, I imagine, I keep a running list of things I’ve done well and things I’ve flubbed. Help our children get lots of sleep? Check. Play fun, stimulating games at dinner? Score. Have peaceful, stress-free mornings when everyone goes into the day uplifted and on time? Hardly. Produce handsome scrapbooks with carefully captioned memories? Not a one. (We do have a few boxes labeled “keepsakes.”) In all this second-guessing, there’s one area where I give myself unqualified high marks: photography. Having grown up surrounded by cameras, I take lots of pictures. But there’s another area where I’m a complete failure: video.
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Blame Your Parents for Your Crappy Math Skills
Pacific Standard: There's a seemingly constant stream of news about how bad Americans are at math, with much of the blame aimed at teachers and the sometimes confusing curricula they're supposed to teach. But, a new study suggests, parents' own anxieties about mathematics might have as much to do with kids' math abilities as teachers or the materials they're supposed to teach. "Although the classroom is usually viewed as the primary vehicle for advancing academic achievement, parents also play an important role in students’ academic success," writes a team of psychologists led by the University of Chicago's Erin Maloney.
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Would You Rather Lose Your Morals or Your Memory?
New Republic: When Nina Strohminger was a teenager, her grandmother had dementia. “Before she got sick, she was not a very nice person,” Strohminger said. “One of the first things that went when this disease was taking hold is she became really, really nice. I just remember her stopping me one day and saying ‘Nina, your skin is so beautiful,’ and I was like ‘what is happening?’” We spoke on the phone, both of us traveling—I paced outside of a Starbucks in Brooklyn while she packed her things to move from Durham, NC, where we both lived at the time, to New Haven, CT, where she’d be starting as a postdoctoral researcher at Yale University.
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Life’s Stories
The Atlantic: In Paul Murray's novel Skippy Dies, there’s a point where the main character, Howard, has an existential crisis.“‘It’s just not how I expected my life would be,'" he says. “‘What did you expect?’” a friend responds. “Howard ponders this. ‘I suppose—this sounds stupid, but I suppose I thought there’d be more of a narrative arc.’” But it's not stupid at all. Though perhaps the facts of someone’s life, presented end to end, wouldn't much resemble a narrative to the outside observer, the way people choose to tell the stories of their lives, to others and—crucially—to themselves, almost always does have a narrative arc.
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Study: Math-anxious parents can hinder children’s math achievement
CBS News: If math makes you anxious, you may now be able to blame your parents. New research published in the Psychological Science, a journal of the Association of Psychology, found that children of math-anxious parents learned less math over the school year than those children of parents who were not math-anxious. The study, led by two University of Chicago psychological scientists, also found that the children of math-anxious parents were more likely to be math-anxious themselves, but only when the math-anxious parents provided frequent help on the child's math homework. Read the whole story: CBS News
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Candy Crush: Study Shows Kids Crave Sugar for Biological Reasons
NBC News: Hearing the familiar jingle of an ice cream truck in the heat of summer may not be the only reason kids constantly crave sweet treats. Children don't just like sugar — they are biologically hard-wired to eat it, according to scientist Julie Mennella, a researcher with the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia. "During periods of growth, they're attracted to foods that give us calories. In the past, it was fruits: dates, honey," she said.
