By the time your rent a van and pay for gas and campgrounds, would you be better off just driving your car and paying for hotels? Here’s the bottom line. Read More
Calculating the Real Cost of Van Life vs. Hotels for a Summer Roadtrip
Calculate the Likelihood of Surviving Your Child’s Last Few Weeks of School
The last few weeks of school are an opportunity for your child to wring every last drop of education from the remaining precious minutes of instruction. And then you wake up. Read More
The Causes of Math Anxiety… And What to Do About It
Math anxiety and along with it math performance come down to adjusting the sliders on a giant mathematical mixing board: push the right sliders up and down, and even students who have felt helpless may have a chance to succeed. Read More
Are Creativity and Psychosis Paired in Your Child’s Genes?
Study in ‘Nature’ shows that creativity and psychosis may have the same genetic roots. Read More
Rewarding Your Child’s Sharing Leads to… Less Sharing
A study in the journal Child Development shows that our intuition about positive reinforcement can be exactly wrong: Rewarding a child’s sharing resulted in the child choosing to share less. Read More
Insight vs. Analysis: A Problem-Solving Throwdown
Insight doesn’t always tell you you’re looking at a llama’s nostrils. But when it does, it’s probably right. Read More
Should You Confront or Let Go of Unfairness?
Unfairness trickles down from one person to others. A new study in the journal Scientific Reports shows how to stop the flow. Read More
One Reason Your Child Should Pity Narcissistic Classmates
Who is besties with a narcissist? Research on best friend pairs shows that narcissists may be stuck with themselves. Read More
Why Math and Reading Skills Usually (But Don’t Always) Go Hand-In-Hand
In elementary school the kids in the “redbird” and “bluebird” reading groups tended to be grouped together for math too. Why is that? Why do math and reading ability go hand-in-hand? And why do some kids break this mold to excel in only one? Read More
Study Shows Immigration Benefits STEM Fields
Does immigration create a rich melting pot or lead to tension? In STEM fields that require complex problem solving, birthplace diversity increases productivity. Read More
Does a Child’s Creativity Come From Persistence or Flexibility?
When the going gets tough, should the tough get going or should the tough try something new? Read More
A Lifelong Geek’s Experience With Sports Tiger Parenting
On his fourth attempt, Leif stood in a position of relative rest halfway through the climb and you could see the panic starting to set in as he looked at the next hold, still impossibly far away… Read More
Paper: It’s Time to Take Santa Workplace Safety Seriously
As a society, we systematically fail to take into account issues of workplace safety that affect or have the potential to affect Santa Claus and his ungulate co-workers every Christmas Eve. A commentary by University of Alberta medical researcher Sebastian Straube hopes to change that. Read More
Does Religion Protect Against Holiday Blues?
Study finds that “the Christmas period is related to a decrease in life satisfaction and emotional well-being.” But not among the very religious… Read More
Data Mining May Make You Less Troll-Like (In-Game and Out)
By compiling millions and millions of League of Legends data points, researchers hint at “psychological traits across global populations.” Read More
Study Shows That Kids Don’t Have To Like Math To Be Good At It
“The present findings could mean that interventions in education that try to increase intrinsic motivation may not be the best approach in the early school years.” Care to discuss? Read More
MIT Study of Tsimané People Shows How to Trick Kids Into Giving You Cookies
How does a child’s sense of fairness develop? A fascinating MIT study shows fairness depends on number sense and not necessarily age or socialization. Read More
Dad Brain. Old Brain. Are You Doomed to Cognitive Decline?
After testing the knowledge of older and younger brains, you give them the right answers and a chance to make changes. Here’s what happens. Read More
Science Finally Proves Superiority of Geek Brain
Studies show that “cultural dysfluency” — Halloween plates on Labor Day, a purple wedding tux, a “good riddance” obituary — jolts brains from complacency and makes people perform better on cognitive tests. This, my friends, is why the geek brain thinks while the mainstream brain coasts. Read More
‘Bedtime Math’ Helps Families Share Math the Same Way We Share Reading
Let’s bond over math the same way we bond over reading–a study in ‘Science’ shows that over the course of a school year ‘Bedtime Math’ pushes kids’ math skills 3 months further than a similar reading app. Read More
Do Your Child’s Friends Help/Hurt Math Skills?
If children followed the rules of real estate, you would expect the poorer mathematician in a friendship to benefit at the better mathematician’s expense. Study says…? Read More
Hedonism, Eudaemonia, and the Secret of Happiness
Might happiness be more than simply feeling good without feeling bad (and maybe the lingering afterglow of smugness)? Read More
Study Shows Why Kids Sink or Swim in Math Education
Most kids who are good or bad at math in first grade are similarly good or bad at math as 15-year-olds. Most but not all. A few get better or worse and a new study shows what’s behind the migration of math ability. Read More
Anger, Sadness, Stereotype, and How to Argue With Your Kids
Imagine you’re driving through a crowded grocery store parking lot when a man on a cell phone walks out in front of you and holds up a hand toward you, palm out. What does he mean by this gesture? Studies show that your interpretation depends on your mood. Read More
Don’t Delay Exploring the Science of Your Child’s Procrastination
Research is showing that procrastination isn’t a defect in ability or personality but rather a disconnect between the demands of a task and what motivates the procrastinator. Read More
One Scientific Way to Help Your Child Deal With Stress
How to help your kids stay in the Goldilocks zone of productive stress even when life makes the porridge too hot. Read More
Insight, Energy, Crickets, And the Science of the Snooze Button
Are the offsprings’ brains better off setting the alarm for 6:00am and hitting snooze for a blissful half an hour, or setting the alarm for 6:34am and sledding to breakfast on a piece of greased cardboard? The answer has to do with crickets… and brain waves… and insight. Read More
Studies Show Hufflepuff Key to Creativity
Creativity isn’t the lucky gift it seems. “This research demonstrates that persistence is a critical determinant of creative performance and that people may undervalue and underutilize persistence in everyday creative problem solving,” write authors Brain Lucas and Loran Nordgren from Northwestern University. Read More
The Science of Becoming a Math Person
What caught my ear wasn’t the fact that a young, hipsterish guy struggled with subtraction Captchas; it was the fact that he excused it, saying, “Hey, I’m not a numbers person…” Read More
A.I. Research Mines ‘Minecraft’ to Mimic Human Learning
“The whole of ‘Minecraft’ is what we refer to as ‘A.I. complete.’ If you can do all of ‘Minecraft’ you could solve anything,” says Brown University researcher. Read More
What Juliet, MacGyver, and Captain Sideways Can Teach Us About Problem-Solving
“Functional fixedness” punks problem-solving. Here’s how to open your mind to the possibilities of everyday objects. Read More
In Your 2-Year-Old: A ‘Genuine Decline in Relational Reasoning’
Younger kids, without the bludgeon of logic, may be better able to open their minds to intuition. Read More
