Quotes from Jane M. Healy

How can children bombarded from birth by noise, frenetic schedules, and the helter-skelter caretaking of a fast-paced adult world learn to analyze, reflect, ponder? How can they use quiet inner conversation to build personal realities, sharpen and extend their visual reasoning?

Neuroplasticity is now thought to include emotional/motivational as well as cognitive circuits. This would mean that a child's habits of motivation and attitudes toward learning don't all come with the package, but are physically formed in the brain by experience.

Children surrounded by fast-paced visual stimuli (TV, videos, computer games) at the expense of face-to-face adult modeling, interactive language, reflective problem-solving, creative play, and sustained attention may be expected to arrive at school unprepared for academic learning—and to fall farther behind and become increasingly "unmotivated" as the years go by.

even the most "turnedoff" kid has potential—it just takes a lot of time and hard work to reroute those maladaptive connections!

if you can help the youngster (or adult!) develop more confidence, positive emotional response, and intrinsic motivation, you may see amazing results, since the brain's emotional centers are so intimately involved in priming circuits for learning.

Certainly, trying to teach the head while ignoring the body and emotions may account for a great deal of school failure.