When you stand by and let bad things happen, your child experiences the twin disappointments that something went wrong and you did not seem to care enough about her to lift a finger to help prevent th...
What matters is not just how motivated someone is but the source and nature of that motivation.13
If, like Charles Silberman, we think school should prepare people not just to earn a living but to live a life—a creative, humane, and sensitive life,22 then children’s attitudes toward learning are a...
The failure to adopt other people’s points of view, to take an imaginative leap out of oneself, is one way to account for much of the behavior we find, troublesome, from littering to murder. (Kafka on...
So what, exactly, is the positive reinforcement that’s being suspended when a child is given a time-out? Sometimes he’s doing something fun and is forced to quit. But this isn’t always the case—and ev...
My wife says [parenting] is a test of your capacity to deal with disorder and unpredictability -- a test you can't study for, and one whose results aren't always reassuring.
Educators remind us that what counts in a classroom is not what the teacher teaches; it’s what the learner learns. And so it is in families. What matters is the message our kids receive, not the one w...
But my point is not just that the psychological theory is inadequate; it is that the practice is unproductive. If we do not address the ultimate cause of a problem, the problem will not get solved. Th...
After all, if we want a child to grow into a genuinely compassionate person, then it’s not enough to know whether he just did something helpful. We’d want to know why.
Where did this disposition come from? And what are our long-term goals for people—particularly children—with respect to motivation?
To examine the claim that rewards are effective at altering behavior, we pose three questions: First, for whom are they effective? Second, for how long are they effective? And third, at what, exactly,...
Thomas Gordon said it well: Children sometimes know better than parents when they are sleepy or hungry; know better the qualities of their friends, their own aspirations and goals, how their various t...
The more pressing question, of course, is how we can communicate our love after kids keep acting up even when we think they ought to know better. (We’ve certainly told them enough times!) Here it’s co...
Some behavioral psychologists defend the practice of punishing employees on the grounds that it helps to clarify management’s expectations of performance and promote goal setting.81 (This is comparabl...
Rewards usually improve performance only at extremely simple—indeed, mindless—tasks, and even then they improve only quantitative performance.
My advice is to make a point of apologizing to your child about something at least twice a month. Why twice a month? I don't know. It sounds about right to me. (Almost all the specific advice in paren...
It’s been said that the personal is political, and there’s no doubt that parenting is intensely personal. To argue against traditional ways of raising children, or to suggest that we can help children...
I think our challenge as parents is to rise above that preference for the child of least resistance and to think beyond short-term success as a criterion—particularly if success is defined by conventi...
Contingent on what, though? Some bases for feeling good about oneself may be worse than others. Jennifer Crocker, a psychologist at Ohio State University, and her colleagues have shown that the progno...
Единственият начин да помогнем на учениците да станат почтени и принципни личности, а не хора, които правят каквото им се каже, е да им дадем шанс сами да открият смисъл в нравствеността. Това означав...