Parenting and Family
I am a contributing editor at Scientific American and write the Brain Waves blog for Psychology Today (you can find those posts here). My work has also appeared in The Atlantic, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, Time, Vogue and many other publications. Earlier in my career, I was on staff at Newsweek, and People, among other places and I’ve included a few of my old favorites from those days.
U.S. Kids Are Falling behind Global Competition, but Brain Science Shows How to Catch Up
These findings did not get the attention they deserved, because they were announced in March 2020, a few days after the World Health Organization declared that COVID had become a pandemic. But they did not come as a surprise—other recent research has shown that about half of American children are not “on track” in at least one critical area of school readiness. Because the OECD report looked at kids who were just starting school, it was a powerful reminder that we have lost sight of something basic: Learning begins on the first day of life—and not the first day of class. The earliest years of a child’s life are full of opportunity. A child’s brain will never be more receptive to experience, more plastic, than it is during this pivotal time. Nearly 85 percent of brain growth occurs between birth and the age of three. During this period one million neural connections per second are formed.
How the Pandemic Has Shaped Babies’ Development
The first two years of life are a time of astonishing brain growth. What has that meant for the toddlers who have only known a world with COVID? Two years is a long time in any child’s life. It’s half of high school and most of middle school, time…
Adolescent Brains Are Wired to Want Status and Respect: That’s an Opportunity for Teachers and Parents
Advances in neuroscience and psychology could lead to real-world benefits in education and mental health
Credit: Alison Seiffer Advances in neuroscience and psychology could lead to real-world benefits in education and mental health Here is a parable for our time: There once was an adult who wanted to encourage eighth graders to eat healthier food. The adult designed a lesson plan full of nutritional information—why…
A Quest for Quincy: Gene Therapies Come of Age for Some Forms of Autism
A gene therapy for Angelman syndrome stands at the forefront of efforts to treat autism-linked conditions that stem from single genes. Photograph by William Mebane Allyson Berent is a specialty veterinarian in New York City. She treats animals that other doctors cannot help. When no good therapies are available,…
What Happens When Kids Don’t See Their Peers for Months
Socializing is a crucial part of growing up. The pandemic brought it to a halt.
Had the spring of 2020 gone as planned, a day in the life of an average child would have meant actual classrooms, baseball games, middle-school plays, and birthday parties where kids ate too much cake instead of waving from the back seat as a parent drove them past their friend’s…
I needed help to sort a lifetime of my mother’s belongings
Moving had been a fraught subject even before my mom got sick. After her diagnosis, we found an organizer-slash-diplomat
I stood in the house where I grew up and considered a stack of moving boxes. All of them bore the same word, scrawled with a Sharpie: HEAVY. They weren’t, really. “Heavy” was a code word, a signal from the woman I had hired to orchestrate my mother’s move from…