Children are born with an innate drive to learn. This is a precious thing. With no direction whatsoever, hunter-gatherer children will learn and master huge volumes of information. Medicinal plants, seasonal foods, animal habits, hunting, building, creating, music, dance, cooking, fire building, fishing, weaving…the depth of knowledge and skills needed…

Numerous studies have shown that there is no benefit to homework in elementary school, and that middle school homework should be very limited. Unfortunately, your average public school doesn’t know this and may start doling out the homework in kindergarten! …

Jeanne-Marie Paynel is the excellent host of The Art of Parenting podcast. She has interviewed parenting experts on a wide variety of issues. I encourage parents to find her and listen to the array of interviews she’s assembled. She brings compassion, experience, and insight to family and parenting challenges. …

How to pursue school intervention services for your child could be a book in itself. While it’s more than I can cover here, I will throw out a few bits of advice. You may find professional help and advocacy for your child at school. Or you may discover the school…

Autism Spectrum and Sensory Processing Issues are currently labeled as behavior disorders, however, they are now known to be neurobiologically based. This means the neurological and chemical connections within the child’s brain are different from what we might consider in the average brain. Sometimes those differences can cause profound difficulties…

Note: Attention Deficit Disorder is now officially classified as a subset of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. I feel the older terms are more accurately descriptive, and ADD kids often get missed. So, I use ADD. ADHD kids struggle with paying attention to less interesting things, have variable executive function challenges…

Another poorly recognized learning difference is in Slow Processing. Processing speed has long been part of IQ assessment. However, it wasn’t given much attention until recently. …

I’m 58 years old and grew up in dance and theater. This was a world open to gay and lesbian people, and with open minded parents, I became quite comfortable with people who were different from me in this way. In recent years a new set of gender differences have…

Dyscalculia is similar to dyslexia in that the symbol of a written number represents an amount (or magnitude) as opposed to a sound. Kids with dyscalculia may have trouble understanding that “3” and “three” are the same thing, and that both represent 3 items. Young kids may have a hard…