A few years ago I did an interview for an online parenting magazine, ParentWonder.com. Their founder, Abel Cheng conducted a very insightful discussion to investigate the importance of recognizing kid’s natural abilities and how parents can hone or nurture their kid’s innate gifts. 
Here is the full interview. 
PS.  Those of us who are parents of sporting dogs are [...]

Neuroscientists are finding more evidence that aspects of our personalities and temperaments are hard-wired.
The recent New York Times Magazine article, The Anxious Mind, by Robin Marantz Henig outlines decades of research by Jerome Kagan, an 80-year-old Harvard professor of developmental psychology who has built a life’s work on studying innate personality traits. Kagan came up [...]

What makes us good at some things and terrible at other things?  Nature and Nurture both play a role.  Behavioral genetics is unraveling the mystery locked in our DNA code and neuroscience is finding the same evidence in our brain circuits.  We aren’t born as blank slates, as conventionally thought.  We each have some of our own pre-existing hardwiring, and, we have a [...]