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Showing posts with the label independence

Passion and Learning

  Learning with Passion and Enthusiasm releases dopamine, which means it works better and is more fun Learning happens inside our brain when new information connects with existing memory. When we are excited or enthusiastic our brain happens to do that much better. In a famous experiment American psychologist, Hans Breiter put cocaine addicts into an MRI. The effect of the drug excited the addicts and the researcher saw a lot of activity in what’s called the Nucleus Accumbent. German scientists did the same experiment with young men and pictures of Porsche cars, which caused the same area to light up. When they did it with pictures of a Daihatsu.. it didn’t. What’s going on here? As soon as we expect something nice to happen, the brain releases it's happiness chemicals dopamine and endorphin as well as other neurotransmitters. While dopamine and endorphin delight us, the other neurotransmitters send information from A to B. This connects new information from outside the brain with ...

Raising Independent Children to be Functional Adults

Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime. - Maimonides (1138-1204)      Independence is a problem when 55% of young adults in the U.S., between ages 18-34, are still financially dependent on their parents. That is more than half! As a teacher and director of child development centers for over a decade, I've encountered children who were about to transition to kindergarten without being able to dress themselves, pour milk into a cup, or even string an intelligible sentence together. It's not because these children aren't capable, but they haven't been given the time and training to develop those skills due to impatience or enabling. This has been called learned helplessness. Before the advent of public education, children would work as farm hands and operate machinery in factories as young as five or six, meanwhile our progressive five-year-olds cannot even tie their own shoes. I'm not advocating for child...