What the Research Actually Says

Why your child forgets Friday's spelling words by Monday — and the simple scheduling fix that changes everything.

Why your child forgets Friday's spelling words by Monday — and the simple scheduling fix that changes everything.

Flow — the state of absorbed concentration where time disappears — is one of the most powerful learning states available. Kids drop into it naturally during deep play. Over-scheduled childhood is crowding it out.

"Flow" — the term coined by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi for the state of fully absorbed, intrinsically rewarding engagement with a challenging…

The Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking — administered to American children since the 1960s — have shown a measurable decline in creativity scores since the 1990s. The cause isn't mysterious. And the fix is known.

Most parents treat creativity as a personality trait — something their child either has or doesn't. Creative kid, analytical kid. Born artist, born…

Executive function in preschool predicts adult income, marriage stability, physical health, and avoidance of legal trouble more strongly than IQ or family income. It's also explicitly teachable.

Here's a finding that should change how we think about early childhood.

The modern parenting impulse is to fill every moment with enrichment. The brain, it turns out, needs emptiness — unscheduled, unprogrammed time in which it has to organize its own activity — to build executive function.

Modern American childhood has quietly become one of the most scheduled periods in human history. Soccer. Music lessons. Enrichment classes. Educational…

Working memory predicts academic achievement more reliably than IQ. It can also be trained. Most schools don't teach it; most parents don't know how to.

IQ tests have historically been treated as the best predictor of academic success. The newer research on cognitive development has produced a surprising…