By Sarah Vander Schaaff Remember “The Opposite” episode of Seinfeld when George realizes, “…that every decision I’ve ever made, my entire life, has been wrong.” He then sets about to turn old patterns upside down—ordering tea instead of coffee and being blunt instead of agreeable in a job interview—and his life radically improves. I sense a similar epiphany in the real-life version of parenthood, but whether we’ll change our ways is yet to be seen. A new study out of the University of Colorado Boulder, says, “…the more time children spent in less structured activities, the better their self-directed executive function. Conversely, the more time children spent in more structured activities the poorer their self-directed executive function.” The senior author of… Read More

As if your life depends on it… In 650 words or less, describe a place or environment where you are perfectly content. What do you do or experience there and why is it meaningful? You are now sitting in the shoes of a high school senior, thank you very much. These questions are a few of the prompts on the 2014-15 Common Application for college. They are the same ones from last year, the makers of the common app essay say, because feedback was positive. Still, Brenda Bernstein, a professional resume writer, personal statement coach, and business copywriter behind the Essay Expert, knows that for some students facing the questions, it’s not that simple. “They don’t all have life coaches… Read More

By Sarah Vander Schaaff Perhaps you, too, once had a weekend in college when you realized you had two days to read 700 pages of Dostoyevsky. I planted myself in a coffee shop and inhaled The Brothers Karamazov, along with the fumes of java, until I got the job done, my own form of crime and punishment. With a few weeks left of summer, I can’t send my kids to a coffee shop, not without a hefty Starbucks bill and some raised eyebrows. But we have work to do! Sure, we’ve been reading, and yes, we’ve been doing math, but there are papers to fill out and more math to be done. How are we going to get it all… Read More

In the process of raising our kids, when we come up against an obvious “miss” in the things we depend on, whether it’s a highchair that could be better designed or a book that could have been better written, we have two choices: settle with the way it is, or take matters into our own hands. It’s the later choice that often drives us to obsession, as it’s done with a few parents I’ve profiled who’ve seen a need for something and then set off on a process of educating themselves and making their concepts a reality. I’ve interviewed moms who’ve figured out how to manufacture better lunch boxes; foster parents who have started charities for kids in the system;… Read More

By Sarah Vander Schaaff You’re probably good at multitasking. I’m with you. I can address 120 holiday envelops while watching Househunters International and check email while I dry my hair. I can even drive while I negotiate a temporary truce between siblings.  It’s task-switching, though, where I really shine. I’ve gone from downward dog to changing the laundry to returning a call and back again before you can say Tadasana. I can do these things, so I’ve never really understood the downside of multitasking.  But recently, my mother handed me a book called “Conquer CyberOverload” and I decided to put down my phone and read the 74-page book. The author, Joanne Cantor, Ph. D., a media professor with a background… Read More

By Sarah Vander Schaaff And so we have come to this, a headline: “Let’s stop trying to turn lemonade stands into MBA programs.” In the post in Fortune that followed that headline last July, Dan Mitchell says, essentially, “enough already.” Mitchell’s argument is more nuanced than the headline but his point is blunt: let the games of childhood serve their own purposes. The only thing to squeeze into an afternoon pitching refreshments to the neighbors is a bag of lemons, not lessons in profit margins. Mitchell refers to Michal Lemberger in Slate, who in her post, “Down with Lemonade Stands” debunks the idea that lemonade sales teach entrepreneurship because customers don’t actually compare prices and the quality of the lemonade…. Read More

By Sarah Vander Schaaff I had a good hand. A couple of giraffes, some elephants. My six-year-old opponent was going down in this game of animal rummy. I played my hand, went out, and then she showed me her cards. “Oh,” I said, looking at the cards she’d squirreled away and not wanted to part with. “Actually, you won,” I told her. And so it goes when you play with the foxes. And sheep. And fish for that matter, when each animal is beautifully painted as they are in a deck of eeBoo animal rummy. If one has to lose, at least it can be done with great art. Mia Galison started the unique company eeBoo 18 years ago when… Read More

By Sarah Maraniss Vander Schaaff Sometimes you send Grandma up with the kids to read books at bedtime and they spend all their time watching the Beatles on YouTube. My six-year-old now knows the words to “Twist and Shout” and, like her grandmother, thinks Paul is a heartthrob. Perhaps this is going on in your house this summer. The odds are good. As of next year, 60% of all grandparents will be Baby Boomers. Consider for a moment the reality of Generation Z, (or Generation i, or Generation 2K, or if you prefer, Generation Homeland) hanging out with their Boomer grandparents. These post-millennials are called digital natives, having spent their entire lives connected. I’m pretty sure it was my six-year-old… Read More

By Sarah Vander Schaaff Continuing our series on What to Expect When You Have No Idea What to Expect (raising tweens to teens), we hear from a mother of two girls and a boy, whose ages range from 15 to 17. If the theme last week was to listen to your growing children, this week’s may be to give credence to what they say. They may not tell you much, but behind those bits of expression, may be deep concerns. Our featured mother’s screen name today is: Cobblestone 1. How would you describe the process of raising a child from early tween to teen years? Difficult. We, too, experienced a difficult time for our girls (and boy) during these years…. Read More

By Sarah Vander Schaaff I am not a trailblazer. That may be my mantra as I head into the process of raising a preteen. Someone has done this before—and I want to learn from them. Times change quickly, to be sure; the social media of last year is now passé, and young people seem to absorb cultural shifts light-years ahead of we parents. But there is wisdom in those parents who have crossed these parts, and our next series this summer is going to share it. I’ve asked mothers who have strong relationships with their teenagers how they have maintained such ties and what advice they’d give.  Today we hear from a mother of a fifteen-year-old daughter and sixteen-year-old son. Her… Read More