JBS Faculty/Staff Professional Development Collection: Understanding Adolescents & Self-Development

The measure of a society's health is how well it takes care of the youngest generation. By this standard, we fail. But All Kids Are Our Kids offers an approach to unleash the extraordinary power of community when people unite around a widely shared vision of healthy child and adolescent development.

A must-read for all parents: the generation-defining investigation into the collapse of youth mental health in the era of smartphones, social media, and big tech--and a plan for a healthier, freer childhood.

Details a program for improving communication between parents and children, providing sample dialogues, role-playing exercises, and humorous yet illuminating cartoons.

Many parents find it difficult, even impossible to talk with their kids about love, relationships, and especially sex. But the real choice parents face is not if their kids will learn about these topics, but how they will learn and who will do the teaching.

The definitive book on the rise of "toxic achievement culture" overtaking our kids' and parents' lives, and a new framework for fighting back

A wake-up call for a national crisis in parenting--and a deeply helpful book for those who want to see their own behaviors as parents with the greatest possible clarity.

Veteran educator Riera takes an in-depth look at the most common issues facing parents and teens: alcohol and drugs, academics, sex and dating, divorce, sports, and extracurricular activities. He also tackles kids' newest challenges: text messaging and the Internet, changing driver's license requirements, fad diets and exercise, and more. Offering parents a fresh interpretation of adolescence-that period of growth that is too often misunderstood as a phase to be dreaded instead of enjoyed-Riera recommends some unexpected, yet ultimately successful approaches to parenting.

Girls with Asperger's Syndrome are less frequently diagnosed than boys, and even once symptoms have been recognised, help is often not readily available. The image of coping well presented by AS females of any age can often mask difficulties, deficits, challenges, and loneliness.

Girls today are motivated and hardworking. In school, they regularly outperform boys. But beneath their confident exteriors too often lies a brittle sense of self. Girls are much more likely to experience anxiety and depression than boys, and that gap is increasing. In Girls on the Edge, physician and psychologist Leonard Sax identifies four key threats to girls' success: sexual identity, social media, obsessions, and environmental toxins. Sax provides practical advice on how to improve the odds for your daughter.

This bold and necessary book points out a simple and overlooked truth: most schools never had girls in mind to begin with. That is why the world needs what Sally Nuamah calls "feminist schools," deliberately designed to provide girls with achievement-oriented identities. And she shows how these schools would help all students, regardless of their gender.

Bestselling author of Odd Girl Out, Rachel Simmons exposes the myth of the Good Girl, freeing girls from its impossible standards and encouraging them to embrace their real selves.

Research in psychology has revealed that our decisions are disrupted by an array of biases and irrationalities: We're overconfident. We seek out information that supports us and downplay information that doesn't. We get distracted by short-term emotions. When it comes to making choices, it seems, our brains are flawed instruments. Unfortunately, merely being aware of these shortcomings doesn't fix the problem, any more than knowing that we are nearsighted helps us to see. The real question is: How can we do better? In Decisive, the Heaths, based on an exhaustive study of the decision-making literature, introduce a four-step process designed to counteract these biases.

Most people believe that the best way to motivate is with rewards like money--the carrot-and-stick approach. That's a mistake, says author Daniel H. Pink. In this provocative and persuasive new book, he asserts that the secret to high performance and satisfaction-at work, at school, and at home--is the deeply human need to direct our own lives, to learn and create new things, and to do better by ourselves and our world.

From ticket-fixing in our police departments to test-score scandals in our schools, from our elected leaders' extra-marital affairs to the Ponzi schemes undermining our economy, cheating and dishonesty are ubiquitous parts of our national news cycle--and inescapable parts of the human condition. Drawing on original experiments and research, in the vein of Freakonomics, The Tipping Point, and Survival of the Sickest, Ariely reveals--honestly--what motivates these irrational, but entirely human, behaviors.

The ultimate guide to making changes and following through. Why is it so hard to make lasting changes in our companies, in our communities, and in our own lives? The primary obstacle is a conflict that's built into our brains. Psychologists have discovered that our minds are ruled by two different systems--the rational mind and the emotional mind--that compete for control.