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Tips For Improving Your Teens’ Sleep Schedule
The Wall Street Journal: Many parents wrestle with helping their teenagers get enough sleep, especially when high school classes start before dawn. Battling early school start times and teens’ changing body clocks, which pressure them to fall asleep later, can be overwhelming for parents. I interviewed experts and parents for today’s “Work & Family” column on groggy teens, and they offered some helpful tips. Few teens want parents setting their bedtimes; my own adolescents long resisted my requests to stop texting or Web-surfing late at night. But educating teens on how sleep loss damages health, energy and appearance can encourage them to set their own limits, parents say.
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Study: People Who Wait to Have Sex Are ‘Less Dissatisfied’ in Marriage
The Atlantic: PROBLEM: A lot of "marriage promotion" and youth health movements are predicated on notions of how adolescent sexual gallivanting influences romantic/marital relationships as adults. The dominant notion is that starting earlier means problems later. But there's more to it. Some of what we've heard from previous research: Having sex at younger ages is associated with earlier marriage and cohabitation, more divorce, and more extra-marital pregnancy. METHODOLOGY: Dr.
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Reasoning Is Sharper in a Foreign Language
Scientific American Mind: The language we use affects the decisions we make, according to a new study. Participants made more rational decisions when money-related choices were posed in a foreign language that they had learned in a classroom setting than when they were asked in a native tongue. To study how language affects reasoning, University of Chicago psychologists looked at a well-known phenomenon: people are more risk-averse when an impersonal decision (such as which vaccine to administer to a population) is presented in terms of a potential gain than when it is framed as a potential loss even when the outcomes are equivalent.
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Did You Know It All Along?: The Psychology of Hindsight Bias
The Huffington Post: Who will win the presidency in 2012? Will it be Obama or Romney? It's mid October 2012, and no one can say. Sure, there are pundits aplenty with precise predictions, who speak as though they know exactly what the future portends but in reality are simply parroting a party line. For the rest, of course, it is all too clear that we just don't know. There are no crystal balls, and no one can foresee the future. In fact, there has probably not been such a moment of such perfect uncertainty since the start of the election season. Back in September Obama had an edge, but in recent weeks Romney appears to have closed the gap.
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The psychology of poverty
Marketplace: Imagine this: You’re at your child’s baseball game. You’ve got a deadline coming up tomorrow and its been a hard day. You want to focus on your child’s game, but you can’t. To some, you may seem like a bad parent, but you can’t shake the fact that you have things to do. This is something we can all relate to. Harvard professor Sendhil Mullainathan claims that poverty has a similar effect on people’s minds. “When faced with financial scarcity, people’s minds keep coming back to concerns such as -- how will I pay rent this month,” Mullainathan said. But doesn’t this apply to everyone?
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Take Student Complaints With Caution
Education Week: How much weight should be given to student complaints about their teachers? I ask that question because the evaluation of teachers in the years ahead is expected to include input from students in addition to input from principals, peers and parents ("Seeking Aid, School Districts Change Teacher Evaluations," The New York Times, Oct. 16). I welcome the change. But I have reservations about placing inordinate reliance on student comments. Although students spend considerable face time with teachers, that doesn't necessarily mean they are able to judge their teachers fairly. Take the most familiar complaint that a teacher is boring.
