Stop the educational YouTube videos! Well, maybe not those, but if you really want to improve your kids’ cognitive abilities, you should actually limit the amount of time they spend in front of televisions, computers, tablets, and smartphones, and make sure they get ample sleep, according to a study by Canadian researchers.
"Alpha children wear grey. They work much harder than we do, because they're so frightfully clever."
In a recent AMA, our managing editor Dan Sanchez discussed peaceful parenting, the future of the liberty movement, and more.
Bear constantly in mind the truth that the aim of your discipline should be to produce a self-governing being; not to produce a being to be governed by others. Were your children fated to pass their lives as slaves, you could not too much accustom them to slavery during their childhood; but as they are by and by to be free men, with no one to control their daily conduct, you cannot too much accustom them to self-control while they are still under your eye.
It is impossible to think that an archaic, industrial model of forced schooling can keep pace with the new, tech-enabled, information-saturated economy. Success in the future requires agility, inventiveness, collaboration, and continuous knowledge-sharing. A truly transformative 21st century education model will cultivate, rather than crush, human creativity.
For human potential, few things are more dangerous than a “safe space.” A flourishing life requires what Nassim Taleb calls “antifragility”: the adaptive capacity to self-improve in response to challenge and adversity.
When young people are artificially insulated from the trials of life, they are deprived of the opportunity to develop this vital virtue: to become antifragile. The prolonged fragility that results is often used as an excuse by parents for extending dependence, which only prolongs fragility still further.
I have become more and more uncomfortable with asking kids how they are doing in school. Not only does that send the message that yet another adult is defining them by their school performance, but also that doing well in school equates to learning. Which it doesn't.
Games like Minecraft and Roblox give virtually unlimited play to the imagination, and they provide decentralized platforms on which people can build, divide, or conquer – or simply find a community of gamers with similar interests. The internet brings out the worst in us, but games like Minecraft and Roblox show how it can also bring out our best.
The findings of a Yahoo News/Marist poll show that people over the age of 69 generally don’t have positive views of marijuana. While the majority of younger Americans increasingly view marijuana as a legitimate medication and relatively acceptable recreational substance, the older crowd has been slower to adopt these views.
Chlorpyrifos is a pesticide that has the potential to harm both children and farm workers, but the EPA – the same agency that drew these conclusions – says it will not ban the chemical.
On March 26, 2017, EPA chief Scott Pruitt rejected his agency’s own chemical safety experts who, under Barack Obama, had recommended that chlorpyrifos – one of the nation’s most widely used insecticides – be permanently banned from agricultural use nationwide because of the danger it poses to farm workers. [1]
