Ten Tips for Parents of a Smart Kid

My PsychologyToday.com article today, Ten Tips for Parenting a Smart Child.

is part of a four-part series of tips for smart people. 

The others are: 
Five Tips for Smart People in a Not-So-Smart World

Five Tips for Smart Job Seekers

Six Dating Tips for Smart People  (It will be published 1/11/18 at around 9 PM Pacific time.)




All children are entitled to a fair shot at living up to their potential. That includes intellectually bright and gifted kids. That may be especially true because if they live up to their potential, they're the most likely to cure cancer, become wise leaders, create another Google or iPhone. Especially if you feel the schools aren’t adequately helping your child live up to his or her potential, the tips I offer in my PsychologyToday.com article today might help, even help a lot.

The Stud: A short-short story about the ill-effects of being good-looking

From the beginning, he reaped the benefits of his attractive face: “What a cute baby!” Although average in intelligence and personality, from kindergarten on, he was ever in the “in” group. When hormones kicked in, the benefit grew. Without effort, girls would twirl their hair, tilt their head, and hold out their budding breasts.

In interviews for college, his interviewers fell prey to the well-documented bias toward good-looking people and he was admitted to surprisingly august institutions—with a bigger discount (colleges prefer to call it “scholarship”) from the inflated sticker price.

His unearned interviewing edge extended to job interviews. Before even graduating from college, he got three offers for well-paying sales positions—Alas, we are more likely to buy from a Pretty Person. One offer was in pharma sales. His job would be to convince doctors to prescribe more of the company’s drugs. Another was to sell enterprise suites: complicated software the purpose of which is to get more customers to part from their money. The third offer was to sell medical devices. Because they require shorter time than do drugs to get FDA approval and the profit margins are eye-opening, many entrepreneurs wanting to capitalize on the aging Boomers, develop devices.

He accepted the medical-device job because it had the highest income potential, even though he was to sell only to SMBs. (Our ever longer entitles, emblematic of our ever more complex society, encourages more abbreviations. In this case, Small to Medium-Sized Businesses distilled to SMBs.)
Now, he could woo women not just with his pretty face but with a luxury-affording income. So he received myriad expressions of romantic interest, subtle and otherwise. For example, there was the FedEx box from a stranger. When he opened it, a card lay atop the tissue paper that concealed its contents. It read, “Love Kit.” He pulled back the tissue and there was a sexy nightgown. Beneath that was an 8x10 of an alluring woman wearing it. Beneath was her phone number.

Through his 30s, his looks kept aloft his lifestyle of luxury and women despite his otherwise unexceptional self.

But time waits for no one and as his face aged, his 40s saw a decline in sales and romantic interest. For example, in earlier years, in walking down the street, beautiful women who were staring ahead to avoid unwanted attention, would often bore into his eyes with a melting smile. Now, the women stay eyes-front  He had become invisible.

Having been able to skate on his luxuriant hair and symmetrical features, he had made little effort to develop himself. So his personality and sales skills remained in arrested development. Consistent with a person who had always tried to buy his way into happiness, he deliberated between a facelift and investing in psychotherapy and an MBA in marketing. Natch, he chose the facelift.

A Writer: A short-short story about doing what you love.

It was his second year of teaching kindergarten, his first in a new school. He remembered last year’s first day: Twenty 5-year-olds, most bounding, a few slinking. "So much energy, so many needs. They didn’t train me for this in ed school.”

But it worked out well enough that he was looking forward to his second year, even though it was in a grittier school.

It was Sep 3, 1985, two days before the first day of school. He walked into the classroom where he’d be teaching kindergarten. And there was an orchard of Apple 2e computers. He wouldn’t have expected that his first encounter with The Computer would be in a kindergarten but that was fortunate. A bit technophobic, it was reassuring to think, “If kindergartners can use it, maybe I can.” On one desk, he spotted a software box :“Bank Street Writer.” The blurb explained that it was a children’s “word-processing program” that enables users to erase, insert, and move text far more easily than on a typewriter—No white-out, no need to retype pages.

By nature, motivated by speed, such time-saving drove him to sit at the computer instead of, for example, hanging posters about animals, colors, and the alphabet. Following the software’s instruction booklet, he put the floppy disk into the drive whereupon the screen made clear where you type and how you erase, insert, cut, and paste. That evening, he bought an Apple 2e and a copy of Bank Street Writer, and thus his addiction to writing began.

Confidently, perhaps hubristically, he thought, “If word processing makes writing this easy, why don’t I go all the way and use it to write a book?" And indeed, his first book, “What I Learned From My Kindergartners” was written on that children’s word processor and sold for a $5,000 advance to a family-run publisher.

Over the next 20 years, he made enough from his articles and two books to legitimately call his writing a sideline. At that point, with 20 years in as a public school teacher, he was eligible to take early retirement with one of those generous pensions that school teachers are among the few to still get. “Thank you union. Thank you taxpayer.”

While he’d get additional money for additional years, the golden handcuffs now felt looser, indeed escapable. He felt he still did a decent job of teaching but wasn’t quite as patient nor as inspired to create compelling lessons that met the needs of his classes' ever wider range of students. “Should I quit and become a full-time writer? A fresher teacher might do a better job. I tried changing grades but that didn’t really solve. I might feel more satisfied if I were writing full time instead of blowing 20 kids’ noses and teaching diphthongs, digraphs, and pre-geometry. But there’s a reason the words ‘starving' and 'writer’ so often adjoin. And very few writers get full benefits and a pension.”

In the end, the slogan, “Do what you love and the money will follow” prevailed. Alas, his timing was terrible. Although his writing productivity and reputation grew, his income from writing was flat and eventually flatlined. The rise of citizen journalists, pirated book downloads, and declining newspaper ad revenues thanks to Craigslist’s free ads—slowly morphed his writing sideline into a writing hobby. The final nail was when the Huffington Post gave him an ultimatum, “The world has changed.  A million people would kill to write for us. The pay is zero. Take it or leave it.” So that sanctimonious publication, frequently railing against capitalism, was using one of capitalism’s darker aspects to save a pittance so Arianna Huffington could get even richer.

He continued writing even though it was without pay. That was because he could now write what he wanted and if a publisher didn’t want his work, he’d post the articles on his blog and self-publish books on Amazon. That freedom spawned contrarian work unpublishable in today’s censorious publishing world.

But after two years of seeing his savings decline and, at age 50, envisioning needing to support himself for another 30+ years, he took the additional courses now required to reinstate his teaching license. And on September 5, 2017, he opened the door to Room 112 at Jefferson Elementary School and sat at his desk contemplating the next 20 years of 20 five-year-olds, bright-eyed with anticipation of school’s wonders.

Failing to Come to a Full and Complete Stop: A Christmas story

As my PsychologyToday.com article today, I wrote a vaguely Christmas-themed short story about aging, marriage, and traffic tickets.

Utilitarianism: A Philosophy to live by?

 Most of us want to live a life in which we make a difference. To that end, it helps to have a guiding principle, something we keep in mind as we make major life decisions. One worthy principle is utilitarianism.I explore it in my PsychologyToday.com article today.

Making Mentoring Matter

Too many bright, motivated people don’t live up to their potential. Sometimes, a mental health professional may be required, but other times, just a caring mentor may do, for example, if the person could use better social skills, advising on school, coaching on time management, or simply feels lonely, different from most people.

We typically think of mentoring as older guiding younger but even seniors can benefit from mentoring. But the example I’ll use in my PsychologyToday.com article today on mentoring is a widely under-served group: children with excellent reasoning ability who attend a school with primarily lower-middle-class children. In such schools, programs for high-potential children often have been eviscerated yet the parents are often insufficiently wealthy or knowledgeable to help their kids live up to their potential. Thus, mentoring such students may yield particular benefit.

HERE is the link to the article.

Potent NonProfits and How to Convert a Volunteer Gig into a Paying Job

Many people volunteer, whether as a launchpad to paying work or simply to contribute to a non-profit cause. But what volunteer efforts are likely to make a real difference and where you’re not just one of zillions clamoring to volunteer, for example, for the environment, fight poverty, or dump Trump? And what are the best tactics for converting a volunteer gig into a paying job? I address all that in my PsychologyToday.com article today.

A Self-Appraisal Leading to a New Year's Resolution

Year-end is a good time to inventory your life. So, my PsychologyToday.com article today asks you to look at seven aspects of lifeto see if there's something you'd like to change.

Ugly: A Short-Short Story about Looks

There’s no honest way to get around it: Josh was an ugly child. He was born with deformed, asymmetrical forehead and cheekbones. My PsychologyToday.com article today is a short-short story about him.

Marry? Is the Institution of Marriage Still Viable?

Few decisions have greater import than whether to marry.  

A previous article focuses on the decision of whether to marry a particular person.  This article addresses the institution of marriage itself amid today’s norms, which indeed are achangin'.

Indeed, in an interview, comedian Sarah Silverman,inot joking, called marriage “barbaric.. gross and f–king crazy,”  That’s something that not long ago couldn’t have been said even in jest.

So given today’s realities, how does the institution of marriage compare with a relationship that isn’t legally and perhaps religiously encumbered? I explore that in my PsychologyToday.com article today.

Reducing Holiday Stress

In theory, the holiday season should be less stressful than the rest of the year. During work time, deadlines may be replaced by festivities. After work, get-togethers with family and friends, accompanied by comforting Christmas music, TV specials, and football games, should calm things further. 

 Alas, the words “holidays” and "stress" often adjoin.  Perhaps the tips I offer in my PsychologyToday.com article today can take the edge off.

Stern: A short-short story about people's veneer

People often judge us merely on appearance. After all, after age 30 or certainly 40,  our face reflects our emotional lifetime. But so much resides beneath our veneer. My PsychologyToday.com contribution today offers a short-short story on this.

Hype

We've become inured to hype and it hurts us more than we may realize. I explore in my PsychologyToday.com article today.

Seven Pleasures They've Wrested From Us

Life is not easy. More may be expected from us at work. In relationships, we may be expected to do it all, as the jingle went, “Bring home the bacon, fry it up in a pan....”  We’re told we’re not saving the zillion dollars we’ll need for the ever more absurd cost of college, let alone for retirement.

We’re hamsters on an ever faster-spinning wheel, like when the faster Lucy boxed the chocolates, the faster the conveyer belt went until she just couldn't do it all.

Indeed that’s what’s happening. Many people are breaking. Some drop out and become homeless while others anesthetize with alcohol or drugs. I believe that’s part of the national impetus to legalize marijuana despite it being more dangerous, physically and mentally than the Big Tobacco-driven messaging would have us believe.

Not surprisingly, the U.S. suicide rate is at a 30-year high  And it’s epidemic among middle-aged white men: NBC News cites the Centers for Disease Control findings: “Victims of death by suicide are overwhelmingly white (7 out of 10), male, and between the ages of 45 and 65. “

At the same time, many of life’s soothers have been wrested from us. My PsychologyToday.com article today offers seven examples. It argues that their loss is an underdiscussed cause of modern-day stress.

'I'd Rather Retire But.... Advice for Older Job Seekers

My PsychologyToday.com article today offers advice to older job seekers. 

Saving the Best for Last?

At some point, people’s awareness of their mortality grows, maybe even dominates one’s thoughts.

For the hedonistic, that triggers more desire to travel and otherwise have fun. Doable.

For the relational, it means wanting to spend more time with friends, grandkids, and other relatives. Doable.

For the work-centric, it’s more difficult. As we get older, we’re increasingly passed over for the opportunity to do significant work. It’s often believed that our experience is outweighed by lack of currency, our decreased physical vigor as proxy for decreased intellectual vigor.

My PsychologyToday.com article today offers some relatively accessible ways for the work-centric to have a last hurrah or three.

Disappointment

As my PsychologyToday.com post today, I offer a poem that doesn't rhyme but attempts to distill best advice and radical honesty about responding to disappointment.

THE Gap

We speak of income inequality gaps too symptomatically: We may speak of an achievement gap, income gap,  and digital divide.

But there’s a more foundational gap that society must first address if it expects to close the others: the efficacy gap.

There's consensus that ever more repetitive jobs will be automated, and that ever more of the remaining decent-paying jobs will require technical chops, people skills, and emotional solidity strong enough to handle the accelerating pace of change, not to mention life's timeless slings and arrows. Alas, too many people cannot be expected to solidly possess that amalgam.

What to do? I offer an approach in my PsychologyToday.com article today.

My Next Book is Coming: Careers for Dummies

I'm pleased to say that I just signed the contract to write the flagship book in the for Dummies career series. It's Careers for Dummies.
Aimed at people starting out, it's designed to offer fresh, best ideas for choosing a career, getting well-trained, and landing a good job or becoming successful self-employed.  It also offers advice on how to succeed, even become beloved. 

Careers for Dummies' major elements:

• The Careers Catalog: a much improved version of what was the most popular part of my previous for Dummies book, Cool Careers for Dummies.  It contains punchy but authoritative introductions to 340 popular and viable under-the-radar careers and self-employment ideas.
• The DIY Under-the-Radar Career Finder
• The DIY Under-the-Radar Business Idea Finder
• Landing a good job, step-by-step. The world has changed. This will offer advice on what works now.
• The Un-MBA: Why one- and few-person businesses should usually do the opposite of what's taught in business school. This will offer a collection of specific business ideas plus step-by-step advice on succeeding.
• The Career Changer:  This will help in choosing your next career, including a collection of rewarding yet easier-to-transition-to options. Plus, it will help you choose your best-fit from among four approaches to changing careers. 
• You U: Getting well trained for a career without a time-consuming, expensive degree. Plus, convincing an employer you're worthy of getting hired.
• The Trends: Eleven major trends you should understand to thrive in our changing work world.
•  What Matters to You? Questions to unearth your life's foundational principles.

Here's the Amazon link to pre-order.

Thoughts on Action vs Reflection

A relative of mine, now 50, has always struggled careerwise. He occasionally emails me a question. Yesterday, he asked me if spirituality and personal reflection are important parts of my worklife. 

I thought my readers might find my response of value so I posted it as my PsychologyToday.com article today.
 

Foiling Dishonest Job Seekers

Whether you’re an honest job seeker or an employer, you’re hurt by dishonest job seekers. The honest job seekers ends up losing jobs to inferior liars. And employers get worse employees, which hurts coworkers, customers, and themselves.

Alas, having been a career counselor to thousands of job seekers and consultants to dozens of employers, I can tell you first-hand that there are a lot of dishonest job seekers who manage to bamboozle employers.

I consider writing my PsychologyToday.com article today, Foiling Dishonest Job Seekers, a bit of penance for remaining silent, occasionally condoning, and even very occasionally, in moments of sympathy for that struggling job seeker sitting in front of me, abetting tactics I wouldn’t be proud to tell my daughter about.

A Fresh Start Yet Again

Here's another of my PsychologyToday.com short-short stories embedding a life lesson or two. This one's about a passive person.

The Nemkos: Making This Your Child's Best School Year Yet

Sam's Saga: What a typical graduate's next 20 years is likely to be like

As my PsychologyToday.com contribution today, I offer a short-short story that projects what a new graduate's life over the next 20 years might be like.

On the Difficulty Of Getting People to Change

My most well-received tip is the Traffic Light Rule: an antidote to long-windedness. Yet even when clients claim to want to use it, despite guided practice and homework, they rarely do. I explore why in my PsychologyToday.com article today.

A Kinder, Gentler Approach to Kim Jong Un

Today, C-SPAN broadcast the United Nations’ unanimous Security Council vote to increase sanctions against North Korea and its nuclear-threatening Supreme Leader, Kim Jong Un. Speech after speech seem psychologically oblivious, merely returning threats of might with threats of greater might.

Of course, it’s possible that the sanctions will work. Some people understand nothing but pain and the threat of more pain. And it’s possible that Kim Jung Un is simply "crazy:” a psychopathic, megalomanical, sociopathic monster, as is often claimed.

But on the possibility that Kim Jong Un is not crazy but just a human being who for, some psychological and practical reasons, has felt backed into a corner and thus feels he must threaten and alienate the world with nuclear threats, assassinations, and human rights violations, even at the cost of great pain to his people, I thought it might be instructive to you if not to him to write a letter to him.

I can't imagine he'd actually read it, so its primary purpose is to offer my readers an approach to dealing with a hated person and to conflict in general that is more consonant with Psychology Today's and its reader's humanistic sensibilities. Perhaps the tactics I use in the letter may be useful as you address conflicts in your life. In that letter, which I post on PsychologyToday.com, I embed those tactics in parentheses and italics.

Tips for Sub-Clinical Sadness, Worry, Anger, ADD/ADHD

Many people have “issues” that don’t rise to the level of a disorder requiring professional help. For example:

• They’re sad by nature or because of external events but they’re not—as in clinical depression— numb or inert, let alone suicidal. They function, just not as happily as they’d like.
• They tend to worry more than they'd like but rarely panic, nor does their anxiety greatly impede their quality of life.
• They’re predisposed to anger but aren’t in an ongoing state of suppressed anger nor are subject to frequent outbursts let alone physical violence.
• They have trouble staying focused but their distractibility doesn’t rise to the level of clinical attention-deficit disorder; neither the spacey version (ADD), or the hyperactive version (ADHD.)

My PsychologyToday.com article today offers not-magic pills that have helped a number of my clients address their sub-clinical malaise. Of course, many of these tips are obvious, yet many of us can benefit from reminders to do even things we’ve successfully used before.

Where Will the Jobs Be?

The University of California Berkeley has invited me to give a lecture open to the public. I’m calling it, The Future of Work. In my PsychologyToday.com article today, I present its key content.

An "Intelligence Pill: One of humankind's most important goals

Psychology professor Jordan Peterson interviewed University of California School of Medicine emeritus Richard Haier, a leading expert on the neuroscience of intelligence. Haier believes that, with a concerted societal effort, an "intelligence pill¹" could be developed.

Thousands of genes may affect intelligence but identifying even a small proportion of them could be of inordinate benefit. A May 25, 2017 article in Nature came to a similar conclusion.

My PsychologyToday.com article today offers some implications.

Pressing the Button: A short-short story about a deathbed review of one's life.

A deathbed patient reviews her life. 

That's the topic of my latest PsychologyToday.com short-short story. They're composites of real-life events with psychological or practical implications.

Making This Your Child's Best School Year Yet

True, your child can probably survive a bad school year. Indeed, genes, parenting, and peers matter more, at least in terms of long-term outcomes.

But think back to your own schooling. Weren’t there years in which you were much happier or less so. Helping your child have a whole year of more happiness—That’s worth your effort.

And much is in your control. My PsychologyToday.com article today offers potent things you can do. No, you needn't volunteer in your child’s class. That’s just not realistic for so many of today’s parents.

Raising a Challenging Child

The Case for Eclecticism

Many psychotherapists, counselors, and coaches feel comforted by having a theoretical framework from which to operate. It’s a scaffolding onto which they can then hang their own ideas as applicable to the client. 

That’s understandable but too limiting.  I make the case for eclecticism in my PsychologyToday.com article today.

The Ridiculousness of Unconditional Love

How wonderful to be loved for just who you are. Conversely, how comforting to feel so close to someone that you unconditionally love him or her.

But how realistic is that? Is it even desirable? My essay in PsychologyToday.com today argues no on both counts.

Career Issues I've Changed My Mind About

Somehow, we’ve come to prize people who stick to their guns. But as Longfellow wrote, “a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds." Not wanting too little a mind, I have tried to remain opening to changing my views. In hopes of encouraging you to do that, my PsychologyToday. com article today describes 11 things on which I’ve changed my mind.

While I’ve changed my mind on many issues, in that article, I describe only items related to my profession: career counseling. Not only have I done the most thinking about that, offering my current thoughts on career may be helpful to yours.

An Ode to the Worker Bee on Labor Day

Labor Day honors workers. And for good reason, indeed for more reasons than we might realize. I describe them in my PsychologyToday.com article today.

Fighting Your Weaknesses

Conventional wisdom says, “Build on your strengths.” And I agree, but some common weaknesses usually must at least be mitigated or you may not get a chance to use your strengths.

Of course, most weaknesses don’t succumb to quick tips but my current thinking on behavior change is that quick tips end up yielding more net good than do protracted prescriptions. 

Quick tips  are particularly likely to yield more net good per-minute of reader time. There are plenty of long articles and books on each of the following but perhaps the quick tips I offer in my PsychologyToday.com article today add something to the corpus.

Becoming a Successful Employee

The advice on how to be a successful employee can reduce to: work well, fit in, yet retain your personhood. 

But in case you’d like a little flesh on that skeleton, I offer that in my PsychologyToday.com article today.

Gaining Your Instructors' Respect

Whether in high school, college, or graduate school, gaining the instructor’s respect is key not only to getting a good grade but, at the risk of sounding like the fuddy-duddy I am, learning more, including acquiring attributes more important than the course content: responsibility, communication skills, and perhaps even—and the data on its teachability is equivocal—thinking ability.

In my PsychologyToday.com article today, I offer ways to gain your instructors' respect.

What if You Lose Your Job?

Losing your job is one of most life’s more stressful events. After all, our identify may be heavily defined by how well we do at work. Indeed, compare the worthiness of a life centered about sex, drugs, and NetFlix with even an ostensibly unimportant worker bee—say a receptionist—who ends up making life easier for countless people.

But losing one’s job can happen to the best of us. What to do? I tackle that question in my PsychologyToday.com article today.

How the Media Influences Us...Perhaps Without Our Awareness

To a greater extent than we may realize, the media, even entertainment media attempts to get us to believe as they do.

My PsychologyToday.com essay  explores how that’s done, using an example: The play, The Book of Mormon.

Terry's Tale: A career saga

As the latest in my PsychologyToday.com series of short-short stories embedding life lessons, I today describe the saga of a 20-something person's career saga. .

Hands-On Careers

Career contentment depends less on a career’s coolness than on whether it matches your core ability: words, people, data, or hands-on.

To that end, here is the fourth in a four-part series. In this installment, I offer brief introductions to some hands-on careers. The previous installments were on careers for word people, for people people, and for data-oriented people.

Career contentment depends less on a career’s "coolness" than on whether it matches your core ability: words, people, data, or hands-on.

To that end, I'm writing a four-part series. In this installment, I offer a brief introduction to some data-centric careers. The previous installments were on careers for word people and on careers for people people. I hope to publish the final one tomorrow. It will be on hands-on careers.

Careers for People People

Career contentment depends less on a career’s “coolness’ than on whether it matches your core ability: words, people, data, or hands-on.

To that end, I am writing a four-part series in PsychologyToday.com. In the first one, I described 11 word-centric careers.

In today's installment, I describe some careers for people people. 

The final two installments will be on careers for data-centric people and hands-on careers.

11 Careers for Word People

Career contentment depends less on a career’s “coolness’ than on whether it matches your core ability: words, people, data, or hands-on.

To that end, I am writing a four-part series in PsychologyToday.com. In the first one, I describe 11 word-centric careers.

The other installments will be people careers, data careers, and hands-on careers.

Is Higher Education America's Most Overrated Product?

I was interviewed today to discuss the question, "Is Higher Education America's Most Overrated Product?" Here is the link:

Smart Onboarding

As they say, you never get a second chance to make a good impression, so getting off to a good start on a job is obviously important.

Of course, in an ideal world, your employer’s onboarding program would fully address that but that’s not always the case. My PsychologyToday.com article today offers some things you can do.