1 . Habits can greatly alter our mood. While we should always minimize our bad habits, it might be a good idea to focus on developing some healthy ones first. Here are some habits that keep you mentally happy.

Practice gratitude.

Are you grateful for what you have?     1     If your answer is, not often, then you should reconsider practicing gratitude. Why? One study found that practicing gratitude has a strong impact on our feelings of hope and happiness.

Give compliments (赞美).

Did you know that paying someone a compliment can really pay off? In one study, participants were randomly assigned to perform acts of kindness or no act every day for 10 days. Researchers measured their satisfaction with life before the experiment was conducted, and then after. Performing acts of kindness resulted in an increase in overall life satisfaction.     2     In fact, it will make you both happy.

Exercise.

Continuous exercise has been shown to reduce stress, anxiety, and symptoms of depression. So, it’s a god habit to practice.     3     Then when that becomes a habit, add an extra five minutes. Continue doing so until you feel comfortable.

Get enough sleep.

    4     Did you know that lack for sleep kills brain cells? And not getting enough sleep can damage our memory, judgment, and reaction time. That’s why it’s best to get an adequate amount of rest each night.

Experience nature.

According to one study, spending 30 minutes or more per week outside in nature can help lower your blood pressure and depression.     5     Those who walked down city streets didn’t show any benefits compared to those who walked in a natural environment.

2 . Education isn’t simply about achieving a “higher state of knowledge”; it’s about equipping students with the tools they need to go out into the world and shape it for themselves. Here is a list of how education could improve the world.

    1    .

Education brings up many environmental topics to students and encourages them to think about the ecosystems around them. Today it is becoming important to be aware of this and education allows us to consume more responsibly and take action for the care of our planet.

Education helps people develop skills.

Schools cover many topics, and as you continue through schools’ programs, more and more subjects open up to you.     2    , anyone can find their passion and do what they truly love!

Getting an education not only means learning skills like reading and writing, but also means knowing abstract concepts like teamwork, critical thinking and creativity.    3    , you become an individual who is more likely to live a greater life than someone less educated.

Education is a step toward world peace.

    4    ! Research shows that countries with secondary school enrollment rates that are 10% above the international average have a 3% lower rate of engaging in a war. It has been shown that educated people are less likely to be violent. And this holds true for all regions of the world, whether developed or developing.    5    .

Education is a pretty investment. If one extra year of school can produce such benefits, what will the world be like when universal education becomes a reality?

3 . It’s a beautiful fall day. Before we camp near the river, the children dashed along the water’s edge, leaping off the bank into the slow current, pushing through the mud. The scene is happily familiar. We’ve been coming to rivers since our daughters were babies. In the beginning we went to the wilderness because my husband and I loved it and selfishly wanted them to love it, too. Now we go because we can’t live without it.

According to a report released in February, teenagers in the U.S. are in the midst of an alarming mental health crisis. A survey conducted in fall 2021 found that 30% of teen girls have seriously considered suicide, a jump of 60% in the past decade. Boys are struggling, too. The CDC report calls for greater school involvement in supporting at-risk kids, better access to mental-health services and higher standards for health education. As the mother of two teenage girls, these statistics are terrifying. What can we as parents do?

For our family, the answer has always been nature. After they started school, wilderness trips became our way of disconnecting from our digitized lives, and reconnecting with each other ourselves and the natural world. What began as a family experiment was now a cornerstone in our parenting philosophy: a way of raising healthy, curious, kind, resilient (对困境有承受力的) kids in an increasingly messy world.

I’ve seen firsthand how even a few nights out a few times a year have taught our daughter valuable life skills like cooperation, compassion, resilience, problem-solving and adaptability, which is relevant to everything we do in life.

Will our strategy work? We’re still in the thick of the experiment, so it’s too soon to tell. All we can do is pay attention, keep talking, keep trying and keep going.

4 . We always put into children’s minds that learning to read is extremely important to their future success. But we don’t put that same urgency(迫切性) on adults, even though a large percentage of American adults have a low reading or writing ability.

Learning those skills requires many levels of support. Take, for example, the three hours every day in a Louisville community center.

Ardo Ahmed and Yurilia Manzanares are among the people sitting in classrooms and listening to teachers. These three hours are about learning English. Yurilia came to the United States from Mexico, and Ardo from Somalia. “Everyone is coming here to learn English, to have the same kind of support as their children,” their teacher Meagan Lamb said.

Literacy(读写能力) among adults, specifically among moms, is a concern that reaches far beyond Louisville, far beyond immigrant communities. A Barbara Bush Foundation study found fewer than half of American adults can read beyond a 6th-grade level. A study supported by the National Institutes of Health stated “a mother’s reading skill is the greatest determinant of her children’s future academic(学业的) success.”

“There’s a stigma(耻辱) there,” said Felicia Cumings Smith, the new head of the National Center for Families Learning. “There’s quite a bit of funding that goes into literacy for K-12, but if students are not successful during those schooling years, that all comes to an end.”

These three hours, every day, make a difference. But they’re only possible because the community center where they take place provides childcare while the parents learn English.

The children are learning English, which creates even more stimulus for the parents to learn as well.

“The kids are speaking English in school every day,” Meagan said. “And then they go back home, and little by little Spanish doesn’t feel like their native language.” It’s why, in the last of these three hours, Yurilia and Ardo attend “Parent Time”. It’s where they practice not just the language but how to apply it.

5 . Whether your kid can count on a sizable inheritance (遗产) or your family is living pay period to pay period, a college degree is a must. Along with the invisible life skills you get from those formative years on campus, college comes with a bankable payout: A Georgetown University study found that, on average, college graduates make a million dollars more over a lifetime than people who stop at high school.

Recently, a Bronx nonprofit asked me to speak to a group of high schoolers whose families were struggling financially. The participants were (rightly) worried about taking on too much college debt. Here’s what I told them: Even when you subtract (扣除) tuition, lost earnings during the college years, and other factors, an average college grad will still take in $300,000 more than those without a college degree.

And while rising tuition fees are a serious worry, free college programs of one kind or another have sprung up in more than 20 states. My own home state, New York, boasts one of the most comprehensive efforts. The Excelsior Scholarship program guarantees that students at public institutions attend tuition-free if their family earns under $110,000 a year.

Even in Silicon Valley, where there are many successful people who don’t own a college degree, I asked a group of parents there if it’s true that kids are giving up a college degree because they’re sure they’ll be rich people. The answer was a resounding, unapologetic no.

The truth is that in this STEM (science, technology, engineering and math)-centric age, any form of home-schooling or social education can’t replace the formal school education. Especially in an age when many low-end careers are being replaced by artificial intelligence (AI), a college degree can give your kid an edge.

9 . When my daughter was seven years old, she came home from soccer practice clearly downhearted. When asked, she told me what a teammate said: her teeth were too yellow. My heart broke for her. As parents, we try to keep our children safe, but we can’t always be there to protect our kids from unkind words. I tried to console my daughter. I told her that she has a beautiful smile with nice, strong, healthy teeth. I told her not to let someone else’s criticisms influence her. On the inside, though, I worried. From my youth, I’ve struggled with the concept that my self-worth was directly related to my physical appearance.

When I became a mom, I was afraid that this concept would take root in my daughter. I wanted to protect her little ears from unkind words that might skew(歪曲) her idea of self-worth. I wanted to protect her little eyes from unrealistic beauty standards set by magazines, television, and movies. I wanted to protect her little heart from being broken by the thought that she didn’t live up to the standards in some way.

How, then, can we teach our kids that they are much more than their appearance? We can start by modeling kindness, and self-acceptance in our own lives. Kids tend to copy what adults do and say, so be careful. If we are putting ourselves down, our kids will follow in our footsteps. Instead, adopt a positive attitude when it comes to your own self-worth. Praise kids for their acts of kindness, like sharing with a friend or helping a family member without being asked and talk to them about how it makes them feel.

It’s a hard thing for parents to teach children to be confident in their own skin and to pay more attention to their inner beauty than outward appearance. It’s also worthy of note that there’s nothing wrong with telling your kids they are beautiful. I tell my kids that they’re beautiful all the time. Hopefully, in doing so, they’ll begin to understand that there’s so much more to them than just their shells.

10 . So few adults can remember the details of their own preschool or kindergarten years, it can be hard to appreciate just how much the early-education landscape has been transformed over the past two decades. The changes are not restricted to the physical environment of classrooms. Teaching methods and curricula have changed too. Much greater parts of the day are now spent on what’s called “seatwork”(a term that probably doesn’t need any explanation) and direct instruction, formerly used mainly in the older grades, in which a teacher carefully controls the content and pacing of what a child is supposed to learn.

One study, titled “Is Kindergarten the New First Grade?” compared kindergarten teachers’ attitudes nationwide in 1998 and 2010 and found that the percentage of teachers expecting children to know how to read by the end of the year had risen from 30 to 80 percent. The researchers also reported more time spent with workbooks and worksheets, and less time devoted to music and art. Kindergarten is indeed the new first grade, the authors concluded. In turn, children who would once have used the kindergarten year as a gentle transition into school are in some cases being held back before they’ve had a chance to start.

Until recently, school-readiness skills weren’t high on anyone’s agenda, nor was the idea that the youngest learners might be disqualified from moving on to the next stage. But now that kindergarten serves as a gatekeeper, not a welcome mat, to elementary school, concerns about school preparedness kick in earlier and earlier. A child who’s supposed to read by the end of kindergarten had better be getting ready in preschool. As a result, expectations that may arguably have been reasonable for 5- and 6-year-olds, such as being able to sit at a desk and complete a task using pencil and paper, are now directed at even younger children, who Jack the motor skills and attention span to be successful.

Preschool classrooms have become increasingly difficult spaces, with teachers asking pre-schoolers to finish their “work” before they can go play. And yet, even as pre-schoolers are learning more pre-academic skills at earlier ages, I’ve heard many teachers say that they seem somehow less curious and less engaged than the kids of earlier generations. More children today seem to lack the language skills needed to retell a simple story or to use basic connecting words and prepositions. They can’t make a conceptual analogy between, say, the veins(纹理) on a leaf and the veins in their own hands.

That’s right. The same educational policies that are publishing academic goals down to ever earlier levels seem to be contributing to the fact that young children are gaining fewer skills, not more.