GOOD ADVICE FOR PARENTS
At least, in my opinion it is good advice--and that is, have standards, but don't be overly demanding, don't be "helicopter" parents who demand perfection.  It can be tough on your kids:
"The phrase "I want to be perfect" was searched 14,800 times on Google this month. The Internet, with its slew of self-help articles and downloadable webinars, has become a beacon for the insecure who are desperate to attain perfection.
Yet as our society becomes more obsessed with the idea of flawlessness, parents and their children are the most vulnerable to the perfection infection.
We read the abundant literature available on helicopter parents -- moms and dads who, often in the name of perfection, hover over their children, making sure they always do what they "should" be doing.
For many parents, the feelings of inadequacy and the pursuit of flawlessness mix into a terrible combination. This creates an endless loop of new but unfulfilling accomplishments, because perfection is impossible to permanently achieve.
Parents may suffer when adopting the perfection mindset, but children also bear this burden.
Shamima, 17, explains what many teenagers believe: "If we make a mistake, it will lower people's impressions of us, and that makes us pathetic."
A parent's perfectionist attitude also sets up children for a lifetime of inadequacy.
Shamima adds, "Teens are always aware that other students in their school have stronger abilities than themselves. When they receive their grades, there is a heavy shadow of remorse. Inside, they think their parents are yearning for their child to only be the best."
Unhealthy competition is a major side effect of the parental perfection infection.
Instead of being able to see friends' accomplishments as inspirational or positive, Shamima shares that her successful friends "are like mountains that cast shadows over their meeker peers, and most teenagers are demoralized and feel as though they are worthless, useless and low in comparison."
This tragic sentiment is shared by many teens who feel they cannot be happy for friends because their own parents expect superior accomplishments."

Read the whole thing...

BRAIN TALK
So what happens when you don't get enough sleep? Well, obviously, at times you can still function.  But not as efficiently--and it turns out there's a reason for that, learned through studying the brain:
"Scientists may have found an explanation for all those slip-ups we make when we haven’t gotten enough sleep.
A new study shows that even when we feel wide awake, regions of our brains may be opting to go offline in a sort of rolling blackout similar to what the electric company does when demands for power spike.
Though the study was in rats, its results should be applicable to humans, said Dr. Chiara Cirelli, a co-author on the study and an associate professor in the department of psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.
When it comes to the mechanics of sleeping and waking brains, there isn’t a whole lot of difference between humans and rats, Cirelli said.
To learn what happens in the brains of the sleep deprived, Cirelli and her colleagues wired up the rats’ brains. By implanting electrodes in brain tissue the researchers would then be able to monitor what individual neurons were doing.
Some of the electrodes were positioned deep in the rats’ brains, which means that the experiment will be difficult to duplicate in humans.
The researchers kept the rodents awake long past their “bedtimes,” by dropping fun toys into the rats’ cages. Though they were tired, the rats would continue to play for hours with the novel toys.
As the rats played, the researchers watched what was happening in the rodents’ brains. What they saw surprised them: nerve cells would be sparking one minute and then go completely silent in a kind of nap phase.
You couldn’t tell this was happening by watching the rats playing -- they all looked perfectly normal. But subtle differences showed up when the researchers gave the rats a task to perform.
The rats had been taught to access sugar pellets by reaching through a hole in their cages with just one paw. Getting a pellet through the hole and into the cage takes a lot of concentration and dexterity, Cirelli said. Normally the rats would be able to do this over and over again, only rarely dropping a pellet.
But rats that were sleep-deprived had much less success getting the pellets into their cages.  And when researchers watched what was happening in the rats’ brains, they saw that the mistakes happened when nerve cells went offline in the region that controls movement.
The rats weren’t consistently bad at what they were doing -- one minute they’d be able to pull a sugar pellet in and the next they’d slip up. And therein lies the danger of getting too little sleep, Cirelli said.
Think about driving – or air traffic controllers – she said. You might be going along just fine and then need to make a split-second decision when the wrong brain circuits go offline to catnap. The result could be catastrophic: a downed plane or a driver switching into a lane that already has a car in it. And yet another reason to get your Zzzz’s."


"If we're growing, we're always going to be out of our
comfort zone." -John Maxwell