Evidence-Based Parenting Insights
Explore practical parenting guidance, child development strategies, and expert-backed articles designed to help you raise confident, capable, and emotionally healthy children.
Latest Blogs
Discover curated parenting articles, child development research, and practical strategies designed to help families raise emotionally healthy and confident children.
Gary Story
In the early days of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg ran his engineering teams under a four-word principle that became one of the most quoted and most misunderstood ideas in the...
Perfectionism — The Primer
You have already met Tim. The 7th grader whose mother called him lazy. Who qualified for USAMO and got into MIT. Whose mother sat across from me in my office,...
Perfectionism — The Macro Essay
Something has gone wrong with a generation of young people, and we have spent the better part of a decade arguing about who is responsible for fixing it. The argument...
Perfectionism
Perfectionism — The Macro Essay
Something has gone wrong with a generation of young people, and we have spent the
Perfectionism — The Primer
You have already met Tim.
The 7th grader whose mother called him lazy. Who
Gary Story
In the early days of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg ran his engineering teams under a four-word
Anxiety
Raising Exceptional | The High-Achiever Psychology Series — The Parent Essay
Let me start with something I want you to hold onto through everything that follows.<br
Raising Exceptional | The High-Achiever Psychology Series — The Anxiety Primer, Part II
Part II covers the patterns that are most visible from the outside and most often
Raising Exceptional | The High-Achiever Psychology Series — The Anxiety Primer, Part I
Every high-achieving student carries something. Most parents can see it — the tension before a
Gina Story-Raising Exceptional | The High-Achiever Psychology Series
The first thing her mother mentioned was sleep.
Not the C in Calculus BC.
Motiviation
Motivation-Story-Raising Exceptional | The High-Achiever Psychology Series
There is a word that comes up in almost every conversation I have with the
Luthar
Raising Exceptional | The Luthar Series — Comp/Comp
There is a conversation I have with parents several times a year that follows a
Raising Excellence | The Luthar Series — Harvard Kid
Suniya Luthar died on February 16, 2023. She was sixty-four years old.
She had
Commentary
Commentary-Raising Exceptional | Analysis
The Harvard Crimson published a piece this week by staff writers Sebastian Connolly and Summer
More Blogs
Discover curated parenting articles, child development research, and practical strategies designed to help families raise emotionally healthy and confident children.
The Luthar Series — Article 2 | Full Article
There is a conversation I have with parents several times a year that follows a remarkably consistent script.
A parent comes in concerned about their child’s anxiety. We talk for a while about what the anxiety looks like — the checking, the sleeplessness, the comparison with peers, the way
Raising Exceptional | The Luthar Series — Article 1 | Full Article
Suniya Luthar died on February 16, 2023. She was sixty-four years old.
She had spent thirty years doing something that sounds simple and turned out to be almost impossibly difficult: telling parents the truth about what elite academic environments were doing to their children. Not as an opinion. As
Motivation Story – IvyZen | The High-Achiever Psychology Series | Full Article
There is a word that comes up in almost every conversation I have with the parents of struggling students, and it is almost always wrong.
Lazy.
He’s lazy. She used to care so much and now she’s just lazy. I don’t understand what happened — he was so
The Primer II-Raising Exceptional | The High-Achiever Psychology Series | Full Article
Every high-achieving student compares herself to her peers. This is developmentally normal, socially inevitable, and, in modest doses, motivationally useful. The comparison spiral is what happens when normal social comparison becomes a compulsive, asymmetric, and relentlessly self-undermining process.
The high-achieving student in the comparison spiral notices every peer achievement
The Primer I-Raising Exceptional | The High-Achiever Psychology Series | Full Article
The student in this article is a composite. She is the girl who hasn’t slept properly in six months and doesn’t know it’s affecting her thinking. She is the boy who has joined seven clubs and is president of three and is somehow falling behind in all of them. She
Gina Story-Raising Exceptional | The High-Achiever Psychology Series | The Full Story
The first thing her mother mentioned was sleep.
Not the C in Calculus BC. Not the three club presidencies she was fighting to hold simultaneously. Not the teacher who had told her she couldn’t run student council and DECA at the same time, a ruling Gina was contesting with