Cheater, Cheater, Pumpkin Eater
Friday, November 20th, 2009 Posted in Cheating, Growth & fixed mindsets | 1 Comment »It doesn't feel all that festive to talk about cheating around Thanksgiving. But as kids head into their finals, I think it is appropriate to understand how and why we are raising a generation of cheaters. We've created ...
How to Love Bigger, Better, More
Tuesday, October 20th, 2009 Posted in Growth & fixed mindsets, Main essay | 4 Comments »Let’s not lie. Despite his controversial views on parenting, I love Michael Lewis. I LOVE his book about parenting, even though much of it goes against what I preach; I love his sense of humor; I love that ...
Let Kids Just Play
Thursday, September 17th, 2009 Posted in Main essay, Play & creativity, School & scheduling | 3 Comments »Both of my kids’ teachers this year put articles in their back-to-school information packets about leaving kids with some unscheduled time. You know, bus schedules, info about field trips and the parents club, and by the way: please, please ...
Handling Bad Behavior in Public Places: Alternatives to the Supermarket Squeeze
Wednesday, September 9th, 2009 Posted in Changing bad habits into good ones, Comment Round-up, Emotion coaching, Mindfulness & Meditation, On Life & Being a Parent, Perfectionism, Real-life parenting, Self-discipline | Leave a Comment »“Nobody trips over mountains. It is the small pebble that causes you to stumble. Pass all the pebbles in your path and you will find you have crossed the mountain.” –Author Unknown My point in writing the Bad Mother: Real-Life Tales ...
Bad Mother: Real-Life Tales of Imperfect Parenting
Thursday, August 27th, 2009 Posted in On Life & Being a Parent, Perfectionism, Real-life parenting, Video | 29 Comments »Why the Supermarket Squeeze is a Technique to Avoid If you can’t be a good example, then you’ll just have to be a horrible warning. —Catherine Aird Video: Letting Go of Being Perfect You wouldn’t believe how many people ...
How Intelligence Develops
Tuesday, August 25th, 2009 Posted in Giving & Altruism, Main essay, Success, Trends & Research Participation | 2 Comments »I’ve had a low-grade strep infection for well over a year now, which is ironic since I’m totally saturated in studies which show all the ways that positive emotions (like happiness, gratitude, and compassion) boost your immune system. Nowhere ...
The Happiness Habit Tracker: Backbone of Our New Routine
Friday, August 21st, 2009 Posted in Changing bad habits into good ones, Discipline, Main essay, School & scheduling, Self-discipline | Leave a Comment »I love the Fall, the start of the school year. I always have, and I think it is because I love the new beginning it represents, plus the opportunity the school year brings for a new routine. But ...
Getting Back in the School Year Routine
Wednesday, August 19th, 2009 Posted in Changing bad habits into good ones, Discipline, Empathy, Main essay, School & scheduling, Self-discipline | 2 Comments »"Happiness is not a matter of intensity but of balance and order and rhythm and harmony." —Thomas Merton Summer is coming to a close...Summer is a time of lovely things that look like bad habits once school rolls around again: sleeping late, ...
How to get kids to do boring (but necessary) tasks
Wednesday, April 29th, 2009 Posted in Changing bad habits into good ones, Discipline, Main essay, Rewards, Self-discipline | 28 Comments »Self-discipline is a form of freedom. Freedom from laziness and lethargy, freedom from expectations and demands of others, freedom from weakness and fear. —H.A. Dorfman After much background material about why I was using material rewards before (habit + ...
Punished by Rewards?
Wednesday, April 22nd, 2009 Posted in Changing bad habits into good ones, Discipline, Main essay, Rewards, Self-discipline | 17 Comments »Like most parents, I used to (okay, I sometimes still do) bribe my children. Constantly. As in: “I will give the first kid to have her room clean a whole sheet of new stickers.” Life is full of undesirable ...
Unhappiness is a Bad Habit
Thursday, April 16th, 2009 Posted in Changing bad habits into good ones, Discipline, Main essay, Rewards, Self-discipline | 9 Comments »The other day when I wasn’t giving Molly exactly what she wanted exactly when she wanted it, she yelled at me “If I can’t have a playdate with Claire right now, then I am never going to hug you again!” Made ...
Raising Cheaters
Tuesday, March 24th, 2009 Posted in Changing bad habits into good ones, Cheating, Growth & fixed mindsets, Main essay, Success, Success & failure | 3 Comments »Last week I visited a high school that has a really spectacular Honor Code. There are no locks on the doors, and all the exams are unproctored. For more than 100 years, kids at this school haven’t cheated. But ...
Fake It Till You Make It
Tuesday, February 17th, 2009 Posted in Getting the ratios right, Main essay, Success & failure | 3 Comments »Should you ever just pretend to be happy when you’re not? All this talk about getting our ratio of positive to negative emotions up prompted that question—and the answer is more complex than you might think. Feigning happiness doesn’t count ...
Love: More is More
Thursday, February 5th, 2009 Posted in Compassion, Dads & fathering, Family meals, Fostering social connections, Main essay, On Life & Being a Parent, Praise, Social intelligence, Teaching Emotional Literacy | 2 Comments »You may think Valentine’s Day is for lovers, but I say it is for kids! I didn’t really know how darn much love I had in me until I had kids – and I’ve always been a lover, not ...
Getting the Ratios Right
Thursday, January 29th, 2009 Posted in Getting the ratios right, Growth & fixed mindsets, Main essay, Marriage, On Life & Being a Parent, Praise, Success | 3 Comments »Is it possible to praise your children too much? Last year I spent a lot of time emphasizing the importance of growth-mindset praise, and as a result this is a question I get asked a lot. The corollary ...
Ten 2008 Tips for Raising Happy Kids
Tuesday, January 6th, 2009 Posted in Changing bad habits into good ones, Conflict, Family meals, Forgiveness, Friendship, Gratitude, Kindness, Main essay, Materialism, On Life & Being a Parent, Optimism, School & scheduling, Video | 2 Comments »Replace Your Kids’ Annoying Behaviors with Happiness Habits Some of the most irritating things our kids do (whining and tattling come to mind) are nothing more than bad habits, and as we all know, bad habits are tough to break! ...
Turn Off the Boob-Toob
Wednesday, December 3rd, 2008 Posted in Play & creativity, Screen time | 7 Comments »I know that I seemed to take a bit of an extreme stance in my last posting about kids and TV but a new study out shows, once again, a pretty strong link between happiness and NOT watching television. ...
How to Criticize Your Kids
Wednesday, October 15th, 2008 Posted in Main essay, Perfectionism, Success, Success & failure | 5 Comments »I’ve spent a lot of time blogging about how we should praise our kids, but someone asked me the other day if there is a correct way to criticize them. Good question. Here are some ideas, a ...
How much “screen time” is too much?
Monday, September 22nd, 2008 Posted in Main essay, School & scheduling, Screen time | 29 Comments »When I was pregnant with Fiona, my friends, all childless themselves, thought it would be funny to write an advice book for my husband and I. (No one knew that I would, ironically, go on to be someone who ...
7 Ways to Foster Creativity in Your Kids
Tuesday, September 16th, 2008 Posted in Growth & fixed mindsets, Main essay, Play & creativity, School & scheduling, Success, Success & failure | 4 Comments »Many people assume that creativity is an inborn talent that their kids either do or do not have: just as all children are not equally intelligent, all children are not equally creative. But actually, creativity is more skill than ...
How to Stop Being a Perfectionist
Tuesday, September 9th, 2008 Posted in Growth & fixed mindsets, Main essay, Perfectionism, Success, Success & failure | 4 Comments »If you’ve been reading this series on perfection being a total drag on happiness, and you keep thinking to yourself, crap, I’ve created a perfectionist, and now you’re worried that your daughter is going to end up depressed and stifled ...
How To Make Your Kid into a Perfectionist
Wednesday, September 3rd, 2008 Posted in Growth & fixed mindsets, Main essay, Perfectionism, Success, Success & failure | 1 Comment »In my last post, I made the case for preventing perfectionism in children, and got a slew of emails from people asking how to prevent perfectionism. Kids today, especially upper-middle class kids, are under a lot of pressure to ...
Perfectionism is a Disease
Saturday, August 30th, 2008 Posted in Growth & fixed mindsets, Main essay, Perfectionism, Success, Success & failure | 7 Comments »Although in my last post I heartily extolled the importance of hard work, I'd like to clarify that I'm not advocating that you push your children to become perfectionists. Perfectionism is not a happiness habit. Maybe it isn't ...
The Science of Success
Saturday, August 23rd, 2008 Posted in Kindness, Main essay, Perfectionism, Success, Success & failure | 3 Comments »Psychologists have established a solid link between happiness and success. Happier people earn more money, perform better, and are more helpful to their coworkers. Most people assume that this link exists because people feel happy when they are ...
Back-to-School: Play and Academic Success
Monday, August 18th, 2008 Posted in Discipline, Play & creativity, School & scheduling, Success | 9 Comments »[Note: If you subscribe to get postings by email, I apoligize for the emails you got this weekend. We’re still trying to figure out why they went out (clearly my area of expertise is NOT why feedburner does what it ...
Raising Happy Kids on Summer Vacation
Thursday, July 3rd, 2008 Posted in On Life & Being a Parent, School & scheduling | Leave a Comment »Happy summer! I hope all of your families are settling into a summer routine that is more lazy than crazy. Personally, I find it really difficult not to super-schedule my kids into a different camp each week now ...
Raising Optimistic Kids
Monday, April 21st, 2008 Posted in Growth & fixed mindsets, Optimism, Praise | 6 Comments »The last post was about why we parents should foster optimism in our kids. In a nutshell: there is a close link between how optimistically kids think and how healthy and happy they are—and how they perform academically and ...
Making Dinnertime Worth the Effort
Sunday, March 30th, 2008 Posted in Family meals | 9 Comments »This posting is about how to make chow-time a powerful ritual for kids—and how doing so will make them happier people. At least in my family, dinnertime is really our only daily family ritual. Rituals are any kind ...
How to Get the Most Out of Family Dinners
Monday, March 24th, 2008 Posted in Family meals, Video | 8 Comments »Last week's video and posting take a look at the benefits of dinnertime and what it is we should model during dinner. This video and the posting that will follow give you the tools to make it happen. ...
What Kids Learn During Dinner
Monday, March 17th, 2008 Posted in Family meals | 7 Comments »Of everything I'll discuss on Half Full, having dinner as a family is one of the most important things. Think of it as concentrated dose of nurture and nourishment, two of the greatest and most fundamental human needs. ...
Family Meals are Hugely Important
Monday, March 10th, 2008 Posted in Family meals, Video | 6 Comments »Even if you and your kids are crazy busy, eating together is important for kids' development (and happiness!). Watch this quick video to find out why -- and learn how to get the most out of your family mealtimes. There ...
Let Your Kids Fail
Friday, November 2nd, 2007 Posted in Success, Success & failure, Video | 4 Comments »Sometimes the best thing to do is to let your kids fail a little. There are four ways to view this 3 minute video: 1) Default: Play using Windows Media Player. 2) Mac Users: Play using QuickTime player. 3) Fastest download: YouTube. ...
The Right Way to Praise Kids
Thursday, October 25th, 2007 Posted in Growth & fixed mindsets, Praise, Success, Video | 14 Comments »There are four ways to view this 3 minute video: 1) Default: Play using Windows Media Player. 2) Mac Users: Play using QuickTime player. 3) Fastest download: YouTube. 4) Subscribe to the Podcast. Oh Honey! You’re so—uh—well— Kelly Corrigan: Now that I ...
Achievement Doesn’t Matter
Friday, October 19th, 2007 Posted in Growth & fixed mindsets, Success, Video | 3 Comments »There are four ways to view this 3 minute video: 1) Default: Play using Windows Media Player. 2) Mac Users: Play using QuickTime player. 3) Fastest download: YouTube. 4) Subscribe to the Podcast. We don’t care about results, we care about effort. ...
The Psychology of Success
Monday, October 8th, 2007 Posted in Growth & fixed mindsets, Success, Video | 7 Comments »Kids with "growth mindsets" are more likely embrace challenges and enjoy their activities. There are four ways to view this 3 minute video: 1) Default: Play using Windows Media Player. 2) Mac Users: Play using QuickTime player. 3) Fastest download: YouTube. 4) ...
Introduction: Emotional Literacy & Raising Happy Kids
Friday, October 5th, 2007 Posted in Growth & fixed mindsets, Teaching Emotional Literacy, Video | 3 Comments »Did you know that happiness is a skill you can teach your children? There are four ways to view this 3 minute video: 1) Default: Play using Windows Media Player. 2) Mac Users: Play using QuickTime player. 3) Fastest download: YouTube. 4) ...
This blog is about science-based parenting advice. I'm a sociologist and the executive director of UC Berkeley's 
Appearances on ABC's "View From the Bay."
