Beyond the specific areas in which you need to prepare your children for this crazy new world and, as I have shown, in which popular culture and technology is not helping you, there is an overriding way you can best ready your children for what lies ahead. You need to prepare them for life. You [...]
Sleep may be the most important, though overlooked, contributor to your children’s development and health. The reality is that children can survive without exercise and on little food (though I don’t recommend either), but all children need sleep. It’s often unnoticed because you don’t usually see your children sleeping and its benefits are not readily [...]
The operative word in raising healthy children in this often-times unhealthy digital world they are growing up in is balance. A nutritional analogy works well here. A balanced nutritional diet doesn’t mean 50 percent healthy food and 50 percent junk food. Rather, a balanced diet involves ensuring that your children get adequate nutrition from all [...]
Whether we like it or not, the Internet, social media, and all of the related technology are here to stay. As evidenced every day in so many ways, this new technological landscape brings many wonderful benefits to our family’s lives and relationships. At the same time, as with any new innovations, this impact has a [...]
To give you a sense of the scope of the effect of technology on the psychological and emotional health of young people, I want to describe the results of an international study involving more than 1000 students from ten countries across five continents that asked students to disconnect from technology for 24 hours. The results and insights, [...]
I was recently interviewed for an article about the benefits and costs of the new trend toward so-called smart refrigerators, that is, fridges with internet-connected screens built in (think tablet stuck on a fridge). A still a few years away for most of us, but I would guess that many of you already have a [...]
Your children’s physical health is the foundation for everything they become and do. As corporeal beings, they, like the rest of humanity, are at the mercy of the fitness of their bodies to handle the ordinary challenges and extraordinary demands that are placed on them during childhood and beyond. You are responsible for ensuring that [...]
Technology, such as the Internet, smartphones, and social media, can have great benefits in helping your children form and maintain relationships. At the same time, if not used with limits and guidance by your children, such use may prevent them from developing the essential relationship qualities and skills that have allowed us to make real [...]
As your children develop and enter the social world outside of your home, their peers’ importance to them will grow. In fact, as your children progress through high school, their peer group will exert a sometimes dismayingly great influence over them as you feel your own relationship with them diminish. Basically, being accepted and liked [...]
Nowhere is the impact of popular culture and technology on children’s relationships more noticeable than in families. Both influences have contributed to a growing divide between the traditional roles that children and their parents play while, at the same time, blurring those same lines between parents and children. Over the past two decades, children who, [...]