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Letting Kids Fail Is Crucial
When my older son Jack was in high school, he accepted a summer job selling solar panels door-to-door. My first reaction was to tell him not to do it. I felt protective—afraid of the rejection he would face on doorsteps all summer long. I just couldn’t see how my thoughtful son, a good athlete and straight A student, could cope with so much failure. ... This mindset—what psychologist Carol Dweck calls a growth mindset—is an invaluable resource for children, particularly in a fast-changing world. When my younger son Nick, learning to ski at about age eight, asked me to watch him come down the slope, I dutifully stood at the bottom and waited.
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This Habit Is Quietly Ruining Your Relationships
One night last week, my husband, Tom, and I got into an argument. The next morning, I was still fuming. So I gave him the silent treatment. For the uninitiated, the silent treatment is when a person intentionally refuses to communicate with you — or in some cases, even acknowledge you. It’s a common maneuver that’s used in all sorts of relationships, said Kipling Williams, emeritus professor of psychological sciences at Purdue University who has studied the effects of the silent treatment for over 30 years.
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Young Minds, Smart Strategies: How Children Decide When to Use External Memory Aids
Podcast: Do young children prefer to rely on their memory, or do they take the easier route and use external aids like lists and reminders? Under the Cortex explores.
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The Evermaskers
... The truth, or its best approximation, may be, to some extent, irrelevant. How any given person will perceive a threat is “a deeply psychological phenomenon,” Steven Taylor, a clinical psychologist at the University of British Columbia and the author of The New Psychology of Pandemics, told me, and one that is “influenced by values, your past history, your medical history, and your mental-health history.” (In the U.S., at least, people’s sense of risk from COVID, in particular, also has a strong connection to their politics.) Unless someone’s COVID-cautious habits have been causing major problems in their life, there’s no point in trying to discourage them, Taylor said.
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Four-Year-Olds Respond to Misinformation by Exercising Instinctive Skepticism Muscles
... A different and perhaps more inventive tack entails accepting the inevitability of children spending time online and prodding them to become their own fact-checkers. Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, tested such an approach by asking whether children could learn to recognize misinformation—and to use that ability to develop their own fact-checking skills. Evan Orticio, a graduate student in the research group of Berkeley psychologist Celeste Kidd, and colleagues designed a study to investigate the natural fact-checking abilities of young children.
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Why Old Friends Bring Out Our Worst Teenage Selves
... As viewers get to know the group, they learn that Jaclyn was the ring leader in school. On this vacation, she assumes that role again, paying for the trip and deciding when the group goes out to party and who should hook up with whom. The other two fall in step. Long-term friend groups often contain these kinds of inflexible roles, said Julianne Holt-Lunstad, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Brigham Young University and the director of the university’s Social Connection and Health Lab. Maybe “someone’s more of the leader or the comedian,” she said. This isn’t always a bad thing, but it’s hard to evolve in the eyes of those who know you in one specific role.
