I want to give you some wisdom from my grandma. I had a dream about her recently. She died last year, and was a big influence on my life. She spoke many languages, Yiddish among them, and shared this Yiddish folktale with me. She especially shared it right after I had my baby, when I […]

I was talking to parents last week about their 11-year-old who seems to lack motivation in school and at home. He’ll start his homework and leave it after a few questions. Or, he’ll put off writing a paper until the very last minute, even though his mom has been bugging him to write the darn […]

You are in the kitchen, and your spouse, who is a better chef than you are, is watching you make dinner. You cut the onions, and your spouse comes behind you and re-cuts parts of the onions to be smaller. You grab a spatula, and your spouse tells you “it’ll be easier for you to […]

This is true for our kids. Whoever we decide they are, is who they will be. What does this have to do with helping and resilience?  Last week, we talked about pausing before correcting/helping your child in order for you to see if your help is necessary.  (you can find that information here.) We know […]

Let’s talk about tests.  We want our kids to do well on tests.  Yesterday, I had two conversations that I didn’t think were related, but were.  One was with a mother who has a son in third grade and test prep has been coming up in his school. He goes to a really high-performing school […]

[Read a previous post on: Coby’s Story During The Resilient Reader Program] I’ve been doing a lot of reading about attention lately. How to keep it, how to use it, how to stop checking if I got a new text while I’m typing this blog..  In my reading, I learned a term for something we […]

[Read a previous post on: Why NOT to teach your child the ABC’s (do this instead] Often, one of the first things I hear from parents coming to me is, “my child refuses to read to me.”  Their kid has a hard day at school, and they know that when they get home they have […]

[Read a previous post on: Reading is more than an Academic Subject] You may have seen this recent New York Times article, or this New Yorker article, on the literacy crisis in this country. Currently, only 37% of 4th graders are reading at or above grade level. 63% of fourth graders are below grade level […]

[Read a previous post on: Turning Reluctant Readers into Resilient Readers] This is me as a kid. And, I have a secret to tell you… I was a bad student. I was the kind of student who constantly got calls home with well-meaning declarations from teachers: “she has much potential” but “she just needs to […]

[Read a similar post on: Normalizing Mistakes] The other day, a parent said to me “I know it’s my fault that my daughter is such a perfectionist.” I could tell that she was feeling so guilty. Like all of us feel when we see characteristics we don’t love in ourselves show up in the tiny humans […]