Your Brain on Childhood: The Unexpected Side Effects of Classrooms, Ballparks, Family Rooms, and the Minivan

Your Brain on Childhood: The Unexpected Side Effects of Classrooms, Ballparks, Family Rooms, and the Minivan Review

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Your Brain on Childhood: The Unexpected Side Effects of Classrooms, Ballparks, Family Rooms, and the Minivan Feature

If you wanted to design a way of life that was exactly counter to the needs of developing brains, you would invent something like modern childhood.

We strap newborns into bouncy seats in front of television sets and enroll them in early learning centers. During toddlerhood, we give them learning laptops, battery-powered toys, and educational DVDs. As they get older, we ferry them from dance classes to violin lessons to soccer practices. We push them to do the sorts of things we see more mature brains doing, believing that brain development is a race—the faster our children's brains finish, the better.

But to capitalize on the way the human brain was built to grow, we have to redesign children's environments—their homes, schools, toys, and pastimes. In Your Brain on Childhood, developmental psychologist Gabrielle Principe uses scientific evidence to explain the disconnect between the brain's evolutionary history and our children's technology-centered present—and suggests ways for us to naturalize childhood again.

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Mom-in-Chief: How Wisdom from the Workplace Can Save Your Family from Chaos

Mom-in-Chief: How Wisdom from the Workplace Can Save Your Family from Chaos Review

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We work so hard to build our management and leadership skills in our careers, but we often feel like blithering idiots when faced with a child who won't cooperate, a husband who doesn't pay attention and a household that seems ready to collapse from the weight of our anxiety about chores. “Why can't I be as smart at home as I am at work?” I have often found myself wondering.

These words—written by Carol Evans and excerpted from the Foreword of Mom-in-Chief—sum up why leadership expert Jamie Woolf wrote this book. They reflect the sentiments of countless professional women who feel great about our accomplishments in the workplace but not so great about how we run our homes.

In this one-of-a-kind book, Woolf sets out to help readers bridge the gap between corner office and kitchen counter. Along the way she shares inspiring stories, practical strategies and interactive assessment tools to illustrate how the best workplace practices can bring more joy and success to family life.

Drawing from two decades of experience, she lays out her "best practices" to improve your communication, create a healthy family culture, discover your parent leadership style, manage crises, thrive during adolescence, and juggle work and family priorities. Readers will explore common leadership dilemmas, including:

• When to step in and when to step back
• How to maximize the learning opportunities that come from mistakes
• How to stay connected with a pesky toddler or testy teenager
• How to create rituals that strengthen the family's esprit de corps
• When to push kids and when to let them quit
• How to feel less like a maid or short-order cook and more like a skilled leader capable of unleashing the potential of others.

Mom-in-Chief addresses real quandaries and covers everything that smart career-oriented women need to know in order to fulfill their parenting potential and navigate challenges with skill and grace.

This book is a welcome reminder that leading a family doesn't mean churning out living masterpieces, or indulging children with the perfect everything. It does mean inspiring without pushing your own agenda, nurturing without micromanaging, encouraging without aiming to win a best-of-show competition, and expecting the best without ignoring the joyful ordinariness of childhood.

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