Leonard Sax Quotes

The destructive effects of video games are not on boys' cognitive abilities or their reaction times, but on there motivation and their connectedness with the real world.

Quoting an experienced school counselor: "You can't change a bully into a flower child, but you can change him into a knight.

The destructive effects of video games are not on boys' cognitive abilities or their reaction times, but on their motivation and their connectedness with the real world.

If we fail to provide boys with pro-social models of the transition to adulthood, they may construct their own. In some cases, gang initiation rituals, street racing, and random violence may be the result.

You don't teach virtue by preaching virtue. You teach virtue by requiring virtuous behavior, so that virtuous behavior becomes a habit.

Too often, parents today allow their desire to please their child to govern their parenting. If your relationship with your child is governed by your own desire to be loved by him or her, the odds are good that you will not achieve even that objective.

Why is ADHD so much more common in the United States today than it was 30 or 40 years ago? And why is it so much more common today in the United States than elsewhere? My answer is “the medicalization of misbehavior.

To become a better parent, you must become a better person.

Today, for most kids in the United States and Canada, kids’ primary attachment is to other kids. “For the first time in history,” Neufeld observes, “young people are turning for instruction, modeling, and guidance not to mothers, fathers, teachers, and other responsible adults but to people whom nature never intended to place in a parenting role—their own peers. .

By exempting your child from all chores, as many affluent American families now do, you are sending the message, "Your time is too valuable to be spent on menial tasks," which easily morphs into the unintended message "You are too important to do menial tasks." And that unintended message puffs up the bloated self-esteem that now characterizes many American kids.

If you are working 80 hours a week at a job which shrivels your soul, then you are a slave. I don't are whether you are earning $600,000 a year or more. Life is precious. Each minute is a priceless gift. No amount of money can reclaim lost time.

Robert Grant, sixth headmaster at Shore, was fond of making one particular remark to the parents of students newly enrolled at the school. He liked to say, “I hope your child will be severely disappointed during his time at this school.” The parents were often confused. Why would the headmaster wish for my child to be severely disappointed? Grant would explain that if a student does not experience real disappointment at school, then he will be unprepared for disappointment when it comes in real life.

The child expects to look up to the parent, to be instructed by the parent, indeed to be commanded by the parent. If the parent instead serves the child, then that relationship falls out of its natural balance. You may not earn your child’s love at all—and the

What does it mean to assert your authority as a parent? It doesn’t necessarily mean being a tough disciplinarian. Among other things, it means ensuring that the parent-child relationship takes priority over the relationships between the child and her or his same-age peers.

My parents taught me not to rely on others, unless it involved an electrical current. Our family Sundays were also the source of many, many of our favorite family stories because we were all together.              I wanted my boys to know the same strength. Life is not so scary if you know how to do things,

Turn off the device and take your child for a walk through the woods or on a hike up a mountain. Go on a camping trip. Late at night, when it's absolutely dark, take your child's hand and ask her to look up at the stars. Talk with her about the vastness of space and the tininess of our planet in the universe. That's reality. That's perspective.

Defining yourself in terms of how you rank is always dangerous and ultimately immature. It doesn't matter whether the rank has to do with your grades, your weight or where you finished in the 800 meter race. Becoming a mature adult means, among other things, that you define yourself relative to your own potential, not relative somebody else's standard.

Murray observes further that we have entered a peculiar age, an age in which physicians and lawyers are more plentiful than good plumbers.

More kids are finding real sports too demanding.

Dr. Melvin Connors sums it up nicely in just three words: "culture stretches biology

Gender is important, gender is complicated and gender is meaningful. Know your child and celebrate the kind of girl or boy your child is becoming.

I did not find one that depicts a parent as consistently reliable and trustworthy.

March 6, 1961 I remembered a party in a house outside of Ann Arbor. There was a jazz band -- piano, bass, drums, and sax -- playing in one of the large rooms. A heavy odor of marijuana hung in the air. The host appeared now and then looking pleased, as if he liked seeing strangers in every room, the party out of his control. It wasn't wild, but with a constant flow of people, who knows what they're doing. It became late and I was a little drunk, wandering from one part of the house to another. I entered a long hall and was surprised by the silence, as if I had entered another house. A girl at the other end of the hall was walking toward me. I saw large blue eyes and very black hair. She was about average height, doll-like features delicate as cut glass, extremely pretty, maybe the prettiest girl I'd ever seen. When she came up to me I took her in my arms and kissed her. She let it happen. We were like creatures in a dream. Holding her hand, I drew her with me and we passed through rooms where people stood about, and then left the house. As we drove away, she said her name was Margo. She was a freshman at the university, from a town in northern Michigan. I took her home. It was obvious she'd never gone home with a man. She didn't seem fearful, only uncertain, the question in her eyes: "What happens next?" What happened next was nothing much. We fell asleep in our clothes. I wasn't the one to make her no different from everyone.

Manhood isn’t something that simply happens to boys as they get older. It’s an achievement—something a boy accomplishes, something that can easily go awry. If we ignore the importance of this transition, and fail in our duty as parents to guide boys through it, then we will learn the hard way why traditional cultures invest this transition with so much importance.

Girls spend slightly more time playing with the doll than with the truck. Boys on the other hand typically spend great deal more time playing with the truck rather than with the doll.

Courtney isn’t independent. No 12-year-old truly is. Instead, Courtney has transferred her natural dependence from her parents, where it should be, to her same-age peers, where it shouldn’t be. Courtney’s top priorities now lie in pleasing her friends, being liked by her friends, being accepted by same-age peers. Her parents have become an afterthought, a means to other ends.

In every era and in every culture, warnings abound regarding the errors to which that culture is least prone. In puritanical eras, pastors preach about the dangers of indulging the flesh. In indulgent eras, TV talk show hosts warn about the dangers of puritanism. In an era of “walk tall” and “stand proud,” it takes courage to teach humility. And it won’t earn you many friends.

more than parents. For most of the history of the human race, children have learned culture from the adults. That’s why childhood and adolescence have to last so long in our species. But in the United States today, kids no longer learn culture from the grown-ups. American kids today have their own culture, a culture of disrespect, which they learn from their peers and which they teach to their peers.

But biological sex, male or female, seems to run deeper than sexual orientation, gay or straight. Gay men whether masculine or feminine have more in common with straight men then they have in common with women.

A subtle but pervasive bias has infiltrated gender studies over the past decade. A bias that allows saying unkind things about the majority under the guise of being kind to the minority. But I think the bias is bias.

The change in the early elementary curriculum and the consequent neglect of teaching socialization places a greater burden than ever before on the American parent. But just when kids need parents more than ever to teach them the whole package of what it means to be a good person in this particular culture, the authority of parents to do that job has been undermined. We now live in a culture in which kids value the opinion of same-age peers more than they value the opinion of their parents, a culture in which the authority of parents has declined not only in the eyes of children but also in the eyes of parents themselves. Parents today suffer from role confusion.

Don't pressure your daughter or your son to conform to gender stereotypes. If your son wants to take ballet classes, cheer him on. If your daughter wants to study marshal arts and computer programming, sign her up. Teach your son that there are all kinds of man in the world including men who excel at ballet and macrame. Teach your daughter that there are all kinds of women in the world, including women who are masters of karate and computer programming.

When Aaron came home from the tryout, why didn’t he take up the coach’s challenge to return, to try harder? When Julia discovered that she wasn’t as smart as she thought, why did she collapse? The answer in both cases is that these kids are fragile. It doesn’t take much for them to give up and retreat, as Aaron did, or to fall apart, as Julia did. Fragility has become a characteristic of American children and teenagers to an extent unknown 25 years ago. That

The notion of the opposite sex assumes that you are either masculine or feminine. It assumes a one dimensional continuum: feminine - masculine. But researchers have known for more than forty years that that notional is just isn't accurate.

series of studies over the past seven years has demonstrated clearly and unambiguously that the more time your child spends playing video games, the less likely he is to do well in school—whether he is in elementary school, middle school, high school, or college. This

When parents matter more than peers, they can teach right and wrong in a meaningful way. They can prioritize attachments within the family over attachments with same-age peers. They can foster better relationships between their child and other adults. They can help their child develop a more robust and more authentic sense of self, grounded not in how many “likes” a photo gets on Instagram or Facebook but in the child’s truest nature. They can educate desire, instilling a longing for higher and better things, in music, in the arts, and in one’s own character.

graduates of elite American universities who had little sense of what they wanted to do with their lives. Some of them decided to get a job working for a Wall Street investment bank or management consultancy. If you don’t know what your passion is or what you really want to do, they said, then “you might as well go to Wall Street and make a lot of money if you can’t think of anything better to do.”36 And I have heard similar comments from young graduates of selective colleges and universities. Nobody has ever taught them that what you do influences the kind of person you will become.

I know an American family that spent several years living in England. They had one son, who was an average student: not great, but not terrible. When the family returned home to the United States, the parents enrolled him in the local public school. Mom was startled by the continual drumbeat from teachers and other parents: “Maybe your son has ADHD. Have you considered trying a medication?” She told me, “It was weird, like everybody was in on this conspiracy to medicate my son. In England, none of the kids is on medication. Or if they are, it’s a secret. But I really don’t think many are. Here it seems like almost all the kids are on medication. Especially the boys.

Celebration of the new over the old easily translates into a celebration of young over the old, of young people over old people. The cult of youth, the celebration of youth for youth's sake s more pervasive in the United States than any other culture I have visited . . . When the culture values youth over maturity, the authority of parents is undermined.

Some boys are happier being more feminine than masculine although they still have masculine elements. Some girls are happier being more masculine than feminine although they still have feminine elements. The explosion in the proportion of people who believe that they are trance gender may well represent the failure to understand that gender is two-dimensional not one-dimensional.

The general lack of awareness of gender differences disadvantages both girls and boys, but it disadvantages them in different ways. When teachers don't understand these gender differences, the results too often is a school where the boys think that creative writing is for girls and the girls think physics is for guys. When teachers understand these gender differences they can break down gender stereotypes.

As a society and as parents we face a challenge without precedent. We have to help girls and boys make a transition to a gendered adulthood, to adult life as women and men in a culture in which women can do anything, including being rocket scientists, and men can do anything, including staying home to raise a baby. We have to find ways to value and cherish gender differences without restricting freedom of opportunity.

You have to practice what you preach. Declare the family dinner table to be an electronics-free zone: no texting and no cell phone use allowed at the dinner table. That means you too, Dad. Although teenage girls are more likely than teenage boys to be addicted to texting and instant messaging, there seems to be a gender reversal in the over-30 crowd, with Dad more likely than Mom to be surreptitiously checking messages on his Blackberry at the dinner table.19 All electronic devices should be prohibited at mealtime.

I told mom that she was confusing happiness with pleasure. That's common today. A trip to the video arcade may be a source of pleasure, but it will not give lasting and enduring happiness. This mother's son derives pleasure from playing video games, but playing video games in an online world is unlikely to be a source of real fulfillment. The pleasure derived from a video game may last for weeks or even months. But it will not last many years, in my firsthand observation Of many young men over the past two decades. The boy either moves on to something else, or the happiness undergoes a silent and malignant transformation into addiction. The hallmark of addiction is decreasing pleasure over time. Tolerance develops. Playing the game becomes compulsive, almost involuntary. It no longer gives the thrill and pleasure it once did. But the addict can no longer find pleasure in anything else. Pleasure is not the same thing as happiness. The gratification Of desire yields pleasure, not lasting happiness. Happiness comes from fulfillment, from living up to your potential, which means more than playing online video games.

Girls spend slightly more time playing with the doll than with the truck. Boys on the other hand typically spend great deal more time playing with the truck rather than with the doll. We were taught that the social construction of gender is the appropriate framework in which to understand these results [..] We give girls a fairly consistent message that girls are supposed to play with dolls and not with trucks. So when offered a choice girls will be more likely to play with dolls rather than trucks. But if a girl picks up a truck it's not a catastrophe. WIth boys the stakes are higher, we send boys a much stronger message what a boy is and is not supposed to do. Boys are not supposed to play with dolls. Boys get that message loud and clear.

Starting kids reading before they're ready can actually boomerang and turn them off to reading

If there are 3 girls in a class with 11 boys those 3 girls may feel like they don't belong and no amount of preaching about gender equity is going to change that. But if the class is just girls you may get more girls to sign up and the girls will be more comfortable and will likely gain more competence.

parents might have had more of a clue what was happening if they had shown interest in something other than her academic achievement and her extracurricular activities. Ask your daughter questions like, “What do you like to do for fun?” If a girl answers that question, as Emily did, by saying that she doesn’t have time for fun, that’s a red flag. Ask your daughter, “What three words describe you?” If those words include “hyper” or “anxious” or “wired” or “sleepless” or something similar, dig deeper. Try to understand the source of your daughter’s anxiety. Is she worried about something she thinks the other girls are saying about her? Is she worried about her grades? Is she worried about her weight? You need to know what keeps your daughter awake at night. Be a good listener. Don’t be in a hurry to make recommendations. Just nod and keep your mouth shut until your daughter has had her say. As Levine observes, “When we listen to our friends it is usually with the purpose of understanding their dilemmas, of helping them clarify how they feel, and of letting them know that we care. We listen long enough to know what it feels like to be in their shoes. Too often with our children, we rush in and offer suggestions, propose alternatives, or solve problems.”18

The disruption of those social ties disproportionately affects girls and women.11 What happens when you feel less connected to your neighborhood, less trusting of the people who live next door or down the street? If you’re a guy, then maybe you just stay home and spend a few extra hours playing your video games or put some extra time into your fantasy football league. Girls and women seem to need that network of human connection more, so they miss it more when it’s not there. Professor Twenge examined the correlation between 16 different indicators and the likelihood that a woman is feeling anxious. She found that lack of social trust is the highest predictor of anxiety—higher than the divorce rate, higher than the unemployment rate, and more important than economic conditions generally.12

In his essay for Wired, Thompson writes that “we’re learning to live in front of a crowd.” That’s precisely the problem. The strain of living in front of a crowd, 24/7, 365 days a year, is what causes real celebrities to fall apart. Remember Britney Spears shaving her head and attacking that car with an umbrella? Spears was 25 years old at the time. She wasn’t a teenager. She was (or was supposed to be) a mature adult. She was the mother of two young children.

I think it’s important to support and nurture our daughters’ spirituality, even if it’s not easy. It’s especially difficult if your daughter wants to go in a spiritual direction different from your own. It can feel like a personal rejection if, like Zoe’s Dad, you have no interest in the spiritual life, and your daughter does. Don’t take it personally. Because parents do matter. Researchers have consistently found that the greatest single influence on children’s spiritual development is their parents. “Contrary to popular misguided cultural stereotypes and frequent parental misperceptions,” wrote the authors of a recent large survey, “the evidence clearly shows that the single most important social influence on the religious and spiritual lives of adolescents is their parents.” To be sure, teens often deny outright any possibility that their uncool parents could possibly influence them in any way, and particularly in regard to religion. But the teens are mistaken. Parents are the most important determinants of their children’s spiritual life—or lack thereof.4 If you fail to nurture your daughter’s budding spirituality, it may be extinguished. And if that happens, then your daughter will be at risk for the all-too-common substitution of sexuality in place of spirituality. The spiritual and the sexual are often tightly linked, especially for teenagers and young adults. Some girls will try to find the deepest meaning of their lives in a romantic or sexual relationship. They will be disappointed, because no young man (or woman) can fill the niche in the heart that belongs only to the spirit. But those girls don’t know that. In the first thrill of sexual awakening, they may plunge into sex and romance with the zeal of a new convert.

Share everything. Play fair. Don’t hit people. Put things back where you found them. Clean up your own mess. Don’t take things that aren’t yours. Say you’re sorry when you hurt somebody. Wash your hands before you eat. Flush. Live a balanced life—learn some and think some and draw and paint and sing and dance and play and work every day some. When you go out into the world, watch out for traffic, hold hands, and stick together.

Simplify Your Life by Elaine St. James Mitten Strings For God by Katrina Kennison Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff With Your Family by Richard Carlson Love and Logic by Foster Kline, M.D. and Jim Fay Why Gender Matters by Leonard Sax, M.D., Ph.D. Some

Video games teach these boys that if you manipulate things a certain way, you will get an easy win. These boys have little interaction with people during the years when such interaction is crucial in developing the skills they need to handle themselves as an adult. They shut themselves off to the real world and get caught up in their fantasy worlds. After a while, they prefer their fantasies to the real world. In the real world, things are not so easy to control. They can’t rule with a joystick. In the real world they have to talk to people. They have to work.   That brings up another point. Laziness. A guy addicted to video games can waste hour after hour after hour without doing anything productive. Playing games is easy. Studying is hard. Taking care of daily chores is hard. Working on a real job is hard.   We parents are to blame for some of this because it started out as a way to entertain our kids. We

son muchos los padres que dan por sentado que las buenas notas y las calificaciones elevadas son la mejor garantía y la clave para la felicidad futura. Pero se equivocan. Si quieres que tu hijo esté sano, sea rico y sea sabio, entonces tu prioridad no deberían ser los resultados relacionados con lo cognitivo, como las notas, sino la medida de su diligencia, con rasgos como la honestidad, la integridad y el autocontrol.