31 JUL 2011 by ideonexus
Friendships are the Best Predictor of Happiness
“The only thing that really matters in life are your relationships to other people.”
After nearly 75 years, the only consistent finding comes right out of It’s a Wonderful Life. Successful friendships, the messy bridges that connect friends and family, are what predict people’s happiness as they hurtle through life. Friendships are a better predictor than any other single variable. By the time a person reaches middle age, they are the only predictor. Says Jonatha... 1 
notes
notesHaving strong social bonds and the opportunities for altruistic acts are a strong predictor of lifelong fulfillment.
24 JUL 2011 by ideonexus
The Myth of the Educated Parent
Remarkably enough, the most obvious influence over children's language development turned out to be the mere amount of parents' talking; children whose parents addressed or responded to them more in early life had larger, faster-growing vocabularies and scored higher on IQ tests than children whose parents spoke fewer words to them overall. Parents who talk more inevitably expose their children to a greater variety of words and sentences, so a correlation also turned up between the diversity ...
1 Controlling for socioeconomic status does show that children whose parents are higher on the education ladder will have better grammar; however, parenting style is a much better predictor of a child's improvement than income.
