What’s the Matter with Kids Today?

Q: Are children today more spoiled than we were?

A: Spoiled children have been in literature, the news, and our collective consciousness much longer than we remember. At least that’s what Alfie Kohn, the author of The Myth of the Spoiled Child: Coddled Kids, Helicopter Parents, and Other Phony Crises are attempting to prove.

A lot is said today about the way that parents “coddle” their children or are overly permissive with them. Psychologists and journalists argue that in this new age of parenting, we are producing entitled and spoiled children. Kohn argues that the newness of this phenomenon and the idea that parents create it through permissiveness is a misconception.

Kohn points out that in January 1950 Parents magazine ran an article entitled “When and How to Say No” that condemned parents for being “unable to take the responsibility for being grown up and making decisions.” Later in 1963, Martha Weinman Lear published a book entitled, The Child Worshippers, and made the bold statement, “We are living, like it or not… in a child-centered society.” She went so far to say that it became a “national epidemic.”

So, why Kohn asked, when Newsweek published an article a few years ago asking the question, “Are We Living in a Child-Centered World?” were we made to think that this was a 21^st century parenting singularity? Perhaps because the focus of parenting has changed, but that still doesn’t mean there weren’t spoiled children more than 50 years ago too!

Myths and Facts about Productivity

Q: I never feel like I am functioning at 100%. What’s the best way to be productive?

A: Productivity expert Damon Zahariades does a lot of research on productivity and recently wrote an article about five productivity myths. Below, I’ve broken them down three of them for you so you can better understand what might be holding you back from being your most productive self!

Myth #1: Multitasking makes you efficient: People think that when they move from task to task quickly or even work on two or three tasks at once, they are being more efficient. Research actually shows that when you switch between tasks, you lose concentration and your brain needs a few seconds or minutes to refocus on the new task at hand.

Myth #2: The early bird catches the worm: Not everyone is a morning person. I, for one, do my best work at night when there are few distractions. If you are a morning person, by all means, do your hardest work in the morning. However, everyone should listen to their internal clock and save their hardest work for when they are best able to focus.

Myth #3: You should never work at home: I wrote that sentence while at home, working! And while it is true that they say that home has a lot of distractions, there are a lot of people who actually work more productively and efficiently from home.

If your goal is to be more productive, perhaps one of the first things to do is to understand your own personal productivity myths and facts!