Natalie

Etiquette is a word people typically associate with formal events or something their grandparents would have lectured about. However, with the rise of digital devices etiquette needs to be discussed more openly - namely digital etiquette. Screenagers focused on this very issue - how we can better employ digital etiquette around others and how we can teach our children the same skills. For their tips, please read below: Our kids learn a lot about how to behave with other people by watching us. They see us listen instead of interrupt someone, smile at a cashier, embrace a friend. When we are often out in the social world with a cell phone in our hand, what are we teaching them about digital etiquette? For now, I am not talking about online interactions but rather person-to-person. Etiquette [...]

How often during the day do you ask your teen or young adult to put down their digital devices? Former professor Larry Clayton, has given recommendations in the article below on how to get teens or young adults to put down their phones and experience real life. Did you know, or realize, that high school students spend about nine hours a day on digital media? I didn’t spend nine hours a day on anything when I was in high school. Or in college for that matter, not even obsessing about being in college with a coed population after seven years in an all-boys prep school deprived of the normal interaction between the sexes. This obsession with digital media has resulted in adverse mental, emotional, and physical health consequences. When on campus, I cannot help but observe and [...]

A woman finding out she is pregnant is often a happy time, but can also bring a myriad of symptoms and side effects. Other mothers are always eager to share their tips and tricks to ease the discomforts that accompany this exciting time in life. The latest trend is using marijuana. A recent study, published in the JAMA journal and re-posted below, discusses the reasons for this and the drawbacks involved. More pregnant women are turning to pot to ease such pregnancy symptoms as morning sickness and anxiety, according to a new study published in the journal JAMA. For the seven-year study, nearly 300,000 California-based mothers-to-be, ages 12 and older, completed questionnaires about their marijuana use and took toxicology tests during their prenatal care visits. The results: Marijuana use climbed from 4.2% to 7.1% from 2009 through [...]

The Eternal Umbilicus It's bad enough that today's children are raised in a psychological hothouse where they are overmonitored and oversheltered. But that hothouse no longer has geographical or temporal boundaries. For that you can thank the cell phone. Even in college—or perhaps especially at college—students are typically in contact with their parents several times a day, reporting every flicker of experience. One long-distance call overheard on a recent cross-campus walk: "Hi, Mom. I just got an ice-cream cone; can you believe they put sprinkles on the bottom as well as on top?" "Kids are constantly talking to parents," laments Cornell student Kramer, which makes them perpetually homesick. Of course, they're not telling the folks everything, notes Portmann. "They're not calling their parents to say, 'I really went wild last Friday at the frat house [...]

Recently, the Autism Journal tweeted this quote, “Don’t rescue your child from a challenge, teach them how to face it.” That is the ultimate goal of parenthood – teaching children to overcome obstacles and become adults themselves. However, somewhere along the way parents convoluted that idea into believing that by taking away obstacles they were enabling their children to grow up pain-free. But the results of that theory are coming in all over the nation on high school and college campuses, and it’s not good. Instead of it turning children into capable adults, it’s made them fragile and unable to work through difficulties. In the article below, Psychology Today’s Editor, Hara Estroff Marano writes an interesting piece titled, “A Nation of Wimps” where she explores these ideas, and what it actually takes to raise kids [...]