Growing Up Well

  • Raising Countercultural Kids in the United States of Addiction (Part 3 of 3)

    The trends are not looking good for the mental and emotional health of young people, across all demographics. For instance, most people think of college as one of the happier times in a person’s whole life. However, according to a recent survey by the American College Health Association, 52 percent of college students reported feeling…

  • Take Your Kids Outdoors

    Kids spend well over 40 HOURS per week in front of electronic screens, but less than 40 MINUTES per week in nature. Screens are ruling teens. Delayed Gratification A major component of growing up is learning to deal with long waits and unexpected delays, yet nearly everything is now available in an instant. If we are going…

  • Play Well This Summer!

    Summer School. Summer Job. Summer Reading. Yes, parents need to keep kids mentally active and productive in the summer. Growing up well requires hard work and intellectual development year round. However, parents also need to help kids enjoy life fully, and that absolutely requires fun — the sort of fun that is a little dangerous…

  • Fun = Connection

    Have Fun with Your Child ASAP Good parenting has an order of operations. Insides come first. A child should feel connected to his or her mom or dad in a profound way, first and foremost. Then, and only then, the child will think about what the parent is communicating. A strong emotional bond between parent…

  • Connect With Your Young Teen

    First Connect, Then Guide The best parents are the ones who are deeply connected with their children and offer support and guidance all along the path of life. They’re the ones who care enough to say, “No, you can’t do that, because I love you too much to let you settle for that.” And their…

  • Helping Your Teen Deal with a Sports Injury

    So, your teenager is injured and is out for the rest of the season. Of course, his or her initial reaction will be anger, sadness, self-pity, confusion. That is normal, since this is a form of grief – the loss of something beloved. But after a few days of sulking and trying to come to…

  • Introducing Kids to Nature

    How to Turn Kids On To Nature I can’t tell you how many times one of my middle school students has melted down because he or she could not find his or her cell phone. They just come unglued. Most kids are hooked on their screens. In fact, many of them are better named “screenagers,”…

  • Doodling

    My wife, my 13 year old son, and I went to see The Taming of the Shrew outdoors last night in Forest Park.  Since it’s a free and first-class show, we had to get there very early to get a spot with any sort of good view.  Before the show started, just as we settled…

  • The Race to Nowhere

    The Race to Nowhere is a film that will make you think deeply about what a good education looks like.  It will challenge your beliefs about the nature of homework, AP classes, and college preparation.  You will re-think what a “successful kid” should do in middle school, high school, and college because, in many ways,…

  • Fandango: How boys make friends

    fandango  |fanˈda ng gō|  noun 1. a lively Spanish dance. 2. a foolish or useless act or thing. In May 1993, six young men on the cusp of college graduation, decided to forgo the prudent way to spend the final two days before final exams, in favor of driving south all night toward Mexico in…

  • Video Games

    I grew up with the Atari 2600 video game system.  It was the cultural phenomenon of 1978, right along with Star Wars (I was a nut for both).  To go from the old Pong game system to Space Invaders, Pac Man, Pitfall, and Asteroids seemed like a giant leap for all mankind.  I had such…

  • Youth Sports is a Means to a Greater End

    Every parent of an athletic child wonders if their kid has a shot at the big time.  Well, let’s look at some hard facts related to this question. Just 2 percent of varsity high school athletes will play their sport in college, and only 1 percent will get a scholarship to do so.  Let’s take…

  • Our Friend, Failure

    I once heard a speaker named Dan Miller at an educator’s conference tell the audience about how he learned to fly an airplane.  First, you should know that he is disabled from polio as a teenager to the extent that he can only use one arm, and he walks with a serious limp.  His sickness…

  • Get Out and Play!

    Yesterday afternoon was a cold one – a great day to be inside with some hot chocolate.  The wind chill was in the single digits.  Four inches of snow and ice covered the ground.  Inside, we were perfectly warm and dry. There were five of us (ages 7, 11, 19, 38, 39), standing around in…

  • Career Guidance

    Shaping Your Future Worker By: Ken Canfield Don’t you wonder – and worry – about your child’s future career path? If your kids are like mine, people started characterizing them from an early age: “Wow, she has long fingers. She’ll be a great piano player some day.” Or, “He loves to push buttons and figure…

  • Realistic Expectations for Life

    Donald Miller’s book A Million Miles in a Thousand Years is quite good, but the end of chapter 29 is truly great.  In it, he refers to a recent episode of 60 Minutes, which I vividly recall seeing myself a few years ago.  It was about the happiest people in the world, and I found…

  • Helicopter Parents

    D.H. Lawrence, the literary giant, advised parents and teachers a century ago: “How to begin to educate a child. First rule: leave him alone. Second rule: leave him alone. Third rule: leave him alone. That is the whole beginning.” At first glance this seems to be the worst parenting advice in the history of written…

  • Just Believe in Yourself

    “Just believe in yourself, and you can achieve anything.” “Pursue your dream, and don’t let anyone tell you that you can’t do it.” “If you dream it, you can be it.” Countless movies, songs, TV shows, and motivational speakers have preached this message.  And countless teachers, coaches, and counselors preach the same message.  Parents teach…

  • Time Management for Kids

    As preteens enter the hallways of middle school for the first time, they often feel totally overwhelmed by the amount of teachers, classrooms, schedules, textbooks, new friends, and homework assignments to manage.  In fact, well into high school, most students struggle with managing their lives, for there is always a limited amount of activity, money,…

  • Being a Good Loser in Youth Sports

    After a weekend out of town at my son’s soccer tournament, I’m a little tired of hearing, “Did you win?”  It was, without question, the single-most popular question of the weekend. Even strangers in the hotel would ask my uniformed son, “Didja win?”  And each time he would sadly reply, “No,” followed by an awkward…

  • Facebook Kids

    The most common questions that parents have today are all related to Facebook, since every student wants full access and most parents don’t know enough about it.  It is a generational thing, like rock and roll was misunderstood by our grandparents. In the same way that our parents monitored our use of the telephone, television,…

  • Teenage Media Addiction

    Children of the Screen As much as I like FaceBook and text messaging, I know that it needs to be limited a great deal in my life.  Like so many things, I have learned over the years to balance good things like FB and texting so that they don’t take up all my time and…

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