Parent Resources

Discover fun and creative parent resources, from DIY projects to engaging activities. Make learning and play more meaningful for your child!

A young woman warmly offering a wrapped gift.

Psychologists studying how people get others to comply with requests have found that small, unsolicited acts of generosity reliably create a sense of obligation in the receiver, a mechanism researchers say works whether or not the giver is likable, and one that a separate line of research links to a specific, measurable manipulation tactic called charm

Most kindness is exactly what it looks like. But psychologists who study social influence have spent decades documenting a specific mechanism, one that ordinary generosity

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A 2024 study following workers who experienced day-to-day incivility found that neither confronting the person responsible nor trying to avoid them reliably stopped the bad behavior from happening again, though confronting it did at least improve how the target felt about the relationship afterward

Most advice about dealing with a difficult or toxic person eventually lands on one of two strategies: say something, or steer clear. A 2024 study

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A woman looking out a window in quiet reflection.

Two separate bodies of psychological research, one on wisdom and one on mental health treatment, have independently converged on a similar finding: that loosening a person’s grip on their own fixed point of view, rather than defending it, is consistently linked to clearer reasoning and, in therapy research, lower psychological distress

“Let go of your attachments” has long been spiritual advice, the kind of line that sounds meaningful without ever quite specifying what to do about

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A quaint Southern front porch decorated with an American flag.

Linguists studying Southern speech have identified several genuinely distinct meanings behind the single phrase “bless your heart,” sincere sympathy, affectionate teasing, and a polite way of calling someone foolish, which is part of why the same four words can leave outsiders so thoroughly confused

Outside the South, “bless your heart” has a reputation as a polished insult, the verbal equivalent of a smile with a blade behind it. That

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A woman typing a text message on her phone.

Researchers studying how people judge each other through text messages have found that small, easy-to-miss habits, an unnecessary period, a typo, overly casual phrasing, quietly shape how sincere, intelligent, and warm a person comes across, even when the actual words being sent say nothing different at all

A text message carries almost none of what a face-to-face conversation carries automatically: no tone of voice, no pause, no raised eyebrow. Researchers who study

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A waiter processing a card payment at a restaurant table.

A Pew Research Center survey of nearly 12,000 Americans found no real consensus on one of the most basic modern etiquette questions, whether tipping is a genuine choice or an expected obligation, even as 72 percent said they’re now asked to tip in more places than five years ago

Etiquette advice usually assumes there’s a settled rule waiting to be learned, some correct answer a person just hasn’t been told yet. On at least

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A group of elderly people exercising together.

A Swedish study that followed nearly 800 older adults through the retirement transition found that becoming less socially engaged and less confident in one’s independence predicted a real drop in life satisfaction, while retirees whose social ties and sense of autonomy held steady stayed just as content as before

Retirement is often framed as a single event, the day someone stops going to work, but psychologically it functions more like a slow transition, one

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An elderly couple enjoying a sunny day together outdoors.

Retirement researchers have found that once retirees have enough income to feel financially secure, differences in satisfaction stop tracking closely with how much wealth they actually have, and start tracking instead with health, daily purpose, and the strength of their close relationships

It’s tempting to assume retirement satisfaction is mostly a math problem: save enough, and the happiness follows. The actual research is more layered than that,

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A man and woman sitting on a couch having a calm conversation.

A brain-imaging study found that simply putting a strong emotion into words, saying “I’m angry” rather than staying silent, measurably reduced activity in the amygdala, the brain’s threat-detection center, offering a physiological explanation for why naming a feeling out loud can help defuse a tense moment

People who seem to have a knack for calming down a heated moment are often described as having some innate gift for reading a room.

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A man sitting alone on a bench, looking thoughtful.

A national survey found the share of American men who say they have no close friends at all rose from 3 percent in 1990 to 15 percent by 2021, a fivefold increase researchers link partly to cultural norms that discourage men from leaning on friendships the way women often do

Being a man comes with plenty of advantages that get discussed often. What gets discussed less is a specific, well-documented cost that’s grown sharply over

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A man attentively listening to a colleague in conversation.

We tend to imagine sharp people have some intuitive read on others, but a recent study found their advantage in judging a stranger’s intelligence came down to picking up on specific, learnable cues rather than any general knack for reading people, a distinction the study’s own data bore out directly

There’s a common image of the highly intelligent person as someone with an almost uncanny read on others, sizing up a stranger in seconds through

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Back view of a woman in a coat walking away across a grassy field.

Decades of research on why marriages end found that stonewalling, walking away from conflict abruptly and without explanation, was one of the strongest predictors of divorce, even though a related but different practice, a short and clearly communicated pause, is something the same researchers actively recommend

Psychologist John Gottman spent decades studying how couples fight, tracking their conversations in a lab, sometimes for years afterward, to see which patterns predicted separation

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Parent Resources

A 2024 study following workers who experienced day-to-day incivility found that neither confronting the person responsible nor trying to avoid them reliably stopped the bad behavior from happening again, though confronting it did at least improve how the target felt about the relationship afterward

A Pew Research Center survey of nearly 12,000 Americans found no real consensus on one of the most basic modern etiquette questions, whether tipping is a genuine choice or an expected obligation, even as 72 percent said they’re now asked to tip in more places than five years ago

Retirement researchers have found that once retirees have enough income to feel financially secure, differences in satisfaction stop tracking closely with how much wealth they actually have, and start tracking instead with health, daily purpose, and the strength of their close relationships

A national survey found the share of American men who say they have no close friends at all rose from 3 percent in 1990 to 15 percent by 2021, a fivefold increase researchers link partly to cultural norms that discourage men from leaning on friendships the way women often do

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