Working with young adults keeps me young. It also keeps me looking at how I live as I challenge them to pay attention to how they live. I tell them, “ What you do every day matters.” They act as if they have all the time in the world to make a good decision!...
Read more →Mary Elizabeth Williams’ Salon article about Susan Boyle’s Asperger’ diagnosis is a wonderful look at a woman who has struggled all of her life to make sense of herself. The diagnosis of Asperger’s makes sense to Susan Boyle. It was a long time in coming. She is 52. We all struggle with constructing narratives that...
Read more →The Texas Psychological Association newsletter has featured me as the December Member Spotlight. I kind of think they just pull names out of a hat for this honor, but still, it’s nice to have been picked!
Read more →When the launching process is derailed and the young adult returns home, parents often assume that the young adult will soon mobilize into productive functioning. They look for signs that the young adult will get a job, go to the local college, and, in general, get on with things. Parents soon become annoyed that...
Read more →in the November 29 New York Times, Charles Blow wrote about the difficulties children of poverty have accomplishing life goals when compared to the children of affluence. He used the idea of the hill: For some folks, life is a hill. You can either climb or stay at the bottom. It’s not fair. It’s...
Read more →“Children develop only as the environment demands development.” This is a quote found in David Shenk’s work, The Genius In All of Us, from a 1932 study by Sherman and Key of children growing up in various parts of Appalachia. The more remote the child’s family lived in the mountains of Appalachia, the less...
Read more →I was sitting and waiting to be called for a jury panel as I read the December issue of the APA Monitor. “The Real Secrets to a Longer Life” is an interview with Dr. Howard Friedman. Dr. Friedman has spent his career as a psychologist working with the longitudinal data first initiated by Lewis...
Read more →Many of the young adults I work with want to believe that IQ is what will determine their success later in life. Those of us who have been working for years with high-risk students know that IQ is only a very small part of the equation. Other factors loom much larger and fortunately those...
Read more →It pained me to read the Houston Chronicle article on Texas’ community colleges (10/20/11) by Jeannie Kever titled, “Low Success Rates an Annual Disaster.” The community college systems were never intended to serve 60% of Texas’ college students, but here we have it. Changes in the economy, the lack of manufacturing jobs, and the...
Read more →If only 50% of college students get a Bachelor’s degree in this country, then it becomes important to know the characteristics of those who finish. An article published in Scientific American Mind, Why We Quit by Yvonne Raley, (August/September 2007), describes three contributing factors. 1) There is a good fit between the student and...
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