Browsing: Shy Kids

Last week, @TheAtlantic magazine ran a piece called “Introverted Kids Need to Learn to Speak Up at School,” by Jessica Lahey.  They have graciously agreed to run my response, which includes five suggestions for how shy kids can be encouraged to speak up for themselves in the classroom. ➤ Help Shy Kids – Don’t Punish Them [...]

This news comes via Christopher Lane, author of the incredibly well-reported book Shyness: How Normal Behavior Became a Sickness. According to Lane (who heard it from Britain’s Daily Telegraph), the fifth edition of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-V), due to be released in 2013, will include a definition of social anxiety [...]

Here’s an excerpt from a wonderful piece in Feministing by intellectual powerhouse Courtney Martin, questioning whether contemporary feminism makes room for shy or introverted girls. Courtney articulates something I’ve worried about for years – in our efforts to instill confidence in young women, are we promoting an ideal of sassy outspokenness that’s just as confining [...]

Hi everyone. Here’s a must-read for the weekend: “My Mother’s Lover,” by David Dobbs. It’s the true story of a World War II love affair that Dobbs’ mother kept secret, until she left her kids a puzzle on her deathbed. This is a short e-book/long story, and you have to buy it via Kindle or [...]

One of the luckiest things that ever happened to me was being born into a family that elevated reading to a religious activity. The weekly trip to the library was a form of Sabbath observance in our house. Then there was the yearly pilgrimage to London, which we visited with an empty suitcase reserved for [...]

Did you catch the recent news story about Natalie Munro, the high school English teacher from Pennsylvania who blogged her true feelings about her students? Apparently failing to comprehend the public nature of the Internet, she mused about the nasty things she wished she could write on her students’ report cards. It was an abuse of [...]

Two little boys played at a lakeside beach. The water was cold and reached their waists, in some places their chests.

One boy plunged right in. He didn’t know how to swim, but that didn’t stop him.

The second boy stuck by the shore. He didn’t know how to swim, so he built elaborate sand piles from the safety of the shallows…