Bullying: We All Can Make A Difference

April 05, 2010

Every few years, there is a local incident of bullying that is so horrible, so beyond our understanding that the local incident escalates to a national incident with continued coverage.

The latest of these occurrences is the tragic story of Phoebe Prince, the 15-year old high school student who moved to South Hadley, Massachusetts from Ireland and committed suicide in January. At the end of March, criminal charges were filed against nine students—six of the teenagers were charged with felonies and three were charged as juveniles, all for bullying.

Much of the news coverage of this incident and others like this one has focused on our attempts to figure out what went wrong and to assign blame.  We go over and over the known facts and dig deeper for new facts to try to understand. Is it families with children who bully who are at fault? Is it the school personnel—teachers and administrators—who seemingly stand by and don’t take action when the signs that something is wrong abound? Is it the community—from the law enforcement system to the community culture that are to blame?

I, too, have been asking myself the question of what goes wrong and what can go right. These are especially urgent questions for me because I have spent decades conducting and studying the research on children’s development.

Mind in the Making on Birth to Thrive Online

March 24, 2010

Paul Nyhan recently posted "National Campaign to Help Parents Connect and Use Early Learning Science Launches Next Month" about Mind in the Making on the Birth to Thrive Online blog.

This spring one of the giants of family research will launch a campaign to connect parents and teachers with all of the research on benefits of quality early learning, and help them use it.

Next month, Family and Work Institute head Ellen Galinsky will kick off “A Mind in the Making,” an ambitious and multifaceted effort that will be the culmination of eight years of work on early childhood learning research, why kids lose interest in learning and what can be done to keep them engaged.

Read the full post on Birth to Thrive Online

Updates on the Science of Child Development

February 17, 2010

A New Study by Annie Bernier, Stephanie Carlson, and Natasha Whipple on How Parents Can Help Young Children Gain Life Skills

By Ellen Galinsky

I have spent the past eight years reading child development research, interviewing leading scientists, and we have even filmed these scientists as they conduct their studies. I have been driven by the question: what can we learn from studies of child development that will help our children thrive now and in the future?

As the parent of grown children and as a professional in child development, I have the time and knowledge to understand this research and I have the passion to translate it for all of us.

I have put many of these lessons learned into my forthcoming book, Mind in the Making: The Seven Essential Life Skills that Every Child Needs, to be published in April by HarperStudio.

But there is always new research and we continue to go out and interview and film these studies. So this begins a new series of blogs where I will share what I am learning.

Throw a baby a bone

August 19, 2009

A few weeks ago an article appeared on my internet home page with the screaming headline “Dogs as Smart as 2-year-old Kids.” You can read the article here.

Really?!  I love dogs, and know quite a few very bright ones.  And certainly, dogs have some surprising mental capacities, but they are in no way equivalent to two-year-olds.