teen anxiety

How an adult responds to, and forgives, a child or adolescent  has lasting consequences. A constructive style of responding can foster self-forgiveness and learning in a young person, while a…

Dear Student,
Don’t worry when people tell you it will be hard to find a job. What the doom-and-gloom folks don’t understand is that they have something as contagious as the H1N1 virus– anxiety. Like the flu, they are probably “carriers” without even realizing it. You can innoculate yourself.

If your teen is in the bottom 80% of the class, you may have been told – or thought– that she is “an underachiever” (a polite way of saying lazy or dumb). Underachiever compared to what? Compared to the narrowly-defined measures of school performance or compared to the abilities that will help her to thrive in life?

In my opinion, your child is not under-achieving. I think your child is under-appreciated.

In a recent study, I found that a child’s gifts may actually be at odds with the way he is expected to learn: the very gifts that will help him in life, hurt him in school. The conflict between teens’ gifts and school demands is a good reason to question whether our approach to education is best for teens. Yet there is an even more fundamental reason to re-think this myth.