Whoee! Don’t we all love being right? Back on March 26, I said:

How can I communicate to you that there’s been a huge new discovery – possibly the most important about the human brain in these recent decades of unparalleled discoveries – one that fundamentally advances our understanding of what it is to be human and how it is that we can be human?

That post, Mirror Neurons – 1 will link you to three other posts on the same topic.

The November Scientific American agrees: the cover story features two articles, one by the discoverers of this system of neural circuits that seem to explain so much of what it is to be human:
Mirrors in the Mind
(unfortunately, not available online in its entirety)
and one that speculates about what may happen when these circuits don’t work:
Broken Mirrors: A Theory of Autism

But the point is not simply that there’s interesting theory and rampaging speculation about a newly discovered kind of brain circuitry. The point is: Mirror neurons matter to parents. We need to understand that they exist, how they appear to work, and how they are ready to help us raise our kids. Not that we can say “Hey, Kid-Brain, mirror this!” but that knowing something of this circuitry – how it can help, and how it may be misused – will help us do a better job.

Discuss Mirror Neurons in the Coffee Shop

I was talking a while ago about Chaperone,the new cell-phone-with-GPS unit that allows parents to know where their kids are. Miriam flicked the spy-phone challenge off her sleeve and noted a really fine parental spy technique – communicating:

As a formerly bad girl, this cell-phone-as-tracking-device strikes me as almost embarrassingly easy to foil. Leave the cell phone where you are supposed to be and go somewhere else. How does Mom know you’re ditching school if your phone is in your locker?
However, I am not against less asinine forms of spying on young teenagers. Asking them how their day was is a great technique. Actually listening to the answer is even better, since thirteen-year-olds tend to be horrible liars.
No amount of technology can subsitute for actual parental involvement. Too often, parents focus on the material things that they can provide for their children and end up working so much that they never see them. 40 hours per week is plenty, and it’s all that most of us are paid for anyway (if we’re on salary). I’m not talking about intense, stay-at-home mommy stuff; getting home at 5pm is plenty. And for most of us, it is financially feasible. Just say no to expensive sneakers, and eat dinner together every night. It worked for us.
-Miriam

The conversation’s at Chaperone.

When I was a brand new school psych (pre-Internet), Dungeons and Dragons was a favorite target for public flogging by schools. Of course some of that was directed at wizards and what not – the same silly hysteria that has gone after Harry Potter. But a surprising amount of the criticism was that D&D led kids into isolation – playing the game all the time, how could they have a normal social life? The paradox? For many kids, D&D was their social life. Many of the kids (mostly boys) who played were bright proto-geeks. At school, they were often isolated, rejected, teased, bullied. D&D was a magnet for other kids like them, and they built a terrific social world around gaming.

I think the same thing still holds, not only with games, but with a lot of Net-based activities. Many kids (not only boys now) find a closer, more supportive, more exciting world online than in class. Can schools recognize that reality, and find ways to work with that rich new social world for the benefit of their students?