Your child's intelligence is not the most important predictor of life success. Research shows that self-control ability in childhood is more strongly linked to later accomplishments in areas that parents care about, from education to work to friendships to marriage. Self-control is also a key ingredient of social skills and empathy. Brain imaging studies have revealed that the prefrontal cortex, which is central to these abilities, develops gradually from early childhood through the mid-twenties, and that its function is influenced by life experience. For this reason, the ability to manage your own behavior can be improved through a variety of age-appropriate strategies, which have one surprising thing in common: they're fun for kids. Dr. Aamodt explains how self-control grows in the young brain and what you can do to encourage it from preschool through adulthood.

 

Sandra Aamodt is the author of two popular science books (coauthored with Sam Wang). Welcome to Your Brain: Why You Lose Your Car Keys But Never Forget How to Drive and Other Puzzles of Everyday Life was named Young Adult Science Book of the Year by the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2009. Published in 20 languages, it has sold about 200,000 copies worldwide. Welcome to Your Child's Brain: How the Mind Grows from Conception to College was published in September 2011 in the US and UK and is forthcoming in 8 other languages to date. Her science writing has also been published in The New York Times, the Washington Post, El Mundo and the Times of London, among other places.

She is a former editor in chief of Nature Neuroscience, a leading scientific journal in the field of brain research. She received her undergraduate degree in biophysics from the Johns Hopkins University, and her Ph.D. in neuroscience from the University of Rochester. After four years of postdoctoral research at Yale University, she joined Nature Neuroscience at its founding in 1998 and was editor in chief from 2003 to 2008, when she left to spend a year sailing across the Pacific Ocean. She lives in Northern California with her husband, a professor of neuroscience.