Yanwen’s blog

10/22/2026

I'm continuing my discussion of Kenneth Barish's book on the role of grandparents, The Art and Science of Parenting and Grandparenting (2026).

A Chinese saying goes, “家有一小，老人是宝” (Jiā yǒu yì xiǎo, lǎo rén shì bǎo), meaning, “When a family has a little child, the elderly become treasures.” It highlights the important role grandparents can play when a child is small. In fact, however, a child’s emotional well-being is nurtured throughout childhood—not just during the baby stage, but through countless small, warm gestures and everyday moments. Occasional surprises on holidays or birthdays may bring great joy, but long lasting emotional security grows from the ordinary experiences of being listened to, understood, and loved.

This is where what Barish calls “molecules of emotional health” come into play: the small moments when parents or grandparents listen to children, acknowledge their feelings, and spend unhurried time with them.

Barish highlights several qualities that can make grandparents especially valuable in children's lives. One is their ability to offer a relationship that is not focused on achievement and more on simply being a child.

In many families today, parents feel enormous pressure to prepare their children for a competitive world. The role of Tiger Mom is for real. Daily interactions become centered on getting things right and avoiding mistakes: “Have you finished your homework?” “What grades did you get?” “Mind your table manners!”

I remember a friend who had only one child at the time. When I watched the little girl, I had the impression that she hardly knew what to do because four eyes from her parents seemed to be watching her constantly, ready to correct her mistakes. The pressure to do everything right seemed overwhelming for such a young child.

Of course, parents usually have good intentions. They want their children to succeed and believe that correcting mistakes and setting high expectations will help them. But when too much of a child's daily life revolves around performance, even well-intentioned guidance can become a source of unhealthy stress over time.

Children need a break from competition, too. They need time to play without every activity becoming a learning opportunity, to read for pleasure rather than simply to expand their vocabulary, and to enjoy the moment without worrying about whether they are doing something right.

Grandparents may be particularly well positioned to provide this kind of relief. Having moved beyond many of the anxieties that accompany raising children, they may be better able to step back and see the bigger picture and long term effects. Academic achievement matters, but so do physical health, emotional well-being, and the ability to enjoy life.

When grandparents play with their grandchildren, they do not always need an educational mission or a lesson to teach. Their relaxed companionship and acceptance can send a happy message: You are loved not just for what you achieve, but for who you are.

Imagine a child who can spend a day with a grandparent without being constantly evaluated or corrected—someone who listens to the child's stories, shares a game, takes a walk, or simply enjoys being together. Such moments can help a child feel secure and valued.

This makes me think of Bruno Mars’s song “Just the Way You Are.” Its message reminds us that being appreciated for who we are is a powerful form of love. Grandparents can give children this precious feeling: they do not have to earn affection by getting good grades, behaving perfectly, or meeting someone else's expectations. They are secured and loved simply for being themselves.

A child needs people who help them grow, but also people with whom they can simply be themselves. Grandparents can be one of those people.

Continue tomorrow...

10/21/2026

Recently I came upon this book, The Art and Science of Parenting and Grandparenting  by Kenneth Barish, published in 2026. Dr. Barish is a Clinical Professor of Psychology at Weill Cornell Medicine and Visiting Professor at Tongji Medical College in China.

The book explores an important but often overlooked question: What role do grandparents play in children's emotional development?

Drawing on more than four decades of clinical work, along with research in neuroscience and child development, Barish argues that grandparents' contributions to children's well-being are grossly underestimated.

He believes that the declining involvement of extended family and community in raising children has contributed to the challenges facing American families today. As he points out, throughout human history, parents have rarely raised children with so little support from their extended families and communities as they do today.

Its chapters address several important questions: How can adults support children's emotional health? How can children learn to manage their emotions? How can we nurture empathy, kindness, and social skills? How can parents and grandparents communicate better with children?

Barish's argument raises an important question: What can grandparents offer that parents alone may find difficult to provide?

His discussion highlights some key points.

First, grandparents may have limitations when it comes to childcare.

Their parenting ideas may be outdated, and some of their beliefs may not fit the needs of today's children. Differences between generations can also lead to disagreements about how children should be raised. These challenges are not unique to any one country or culture.

Second, grandparents can still generate values to the family.

They have more time and patience than busy parents, and they can offer grand children a different kind of companionship. Because they are not responsible for every aspect of a child's daily routine and especially for their school work, they may have more opportunities simply to listen, play, share stories, and enjoy being together with the grand children.

Third, these everyday interactions may be more important than we realize.

Barish uses the phrase “molecules of emotional health” to describe the small but meaningful moments when grandparents spend time listening to children, acknowledging their feelings, being their confidants and another channel of support, and offering encouragement. Over time, these experiences can help children develop emotional resilience—the ability to cope with disappointment, manage difficult feelings, and recover from setbacks.

Grandparents do not have to be perfect caregivers in order to care or have to agree with their children's parenting decisions in order to make a difference. Sometimes, their greatest contribution is simply to be another trusted adult whom the child can turn to and who makes a child feel heard, understood, and loved.

Of course, this does not mean all grandparents are obligated to care for their grandchildren. They have their own lives, interests, and priorities, which deserve respect, too. Their care for the grandchildren is entirely of their own free will.

Continue tomorrow...

10/20/2026

My son is learning Chinese so that he can teach his little boy. This makes me think not only about the value of passing a language from one generation to the next, but also about whether learning something new can help keep the brain healthy as we age.

Whenever I think about dementia in older adults, I remember a study published in The BMJ in December 2024: “Alzheimer’s disease mortality among taxi and ambulance drivers: population based cross sectional study.”

The study caught my attention because of its intriguing connection between mental activity and Alzheimer’s disease.

The hippocampus is a brain region essential for memory and spatial navigation. It is also one of the regions affected early in Alzheimer’s disease. An earlier study found structural differences in the hippocampus of London taxi drivers, whose jobs require them to memorize and navigate the city’s complex street network.

Building on this finding, researchers in the United States asked whether occupations that require frequent, real-time navigation might be associated with lower Alzheimer’s disease mortality.

They examined US death certificate data from 2020 to 2022, covering nearly nine million people with recorded occupational information across 443 occupational groups. After adjusting for age at death, sex, race and ethnicity, and educational attainment, they found that taxi drivers and ambulance drivers had the lowest proportions of deaths attributed to Alzheimer’s disease among the occupations studied.

The adjusted proportions were 1.03% for taxi drivers and 0.91% for ambulance drivers, compared with 1.69% for the general population reference. The same pattern did not appear among other transportation workers, such as bus drivers, pilots, and ship captains, whose jobs generally involve less unpredictable, real-time navigation. Nor did the researchers find a similar pattern for other forms of dementia.

These findings are intriguing because they suggest that the kind of mental activity involved in spatial navigation may be relevant to brain health. However, the study has an important limitation: it was observational. It cannot establish that navigating unfamiliar routes protects the brain from Alzheimer’s disease. Other factors may help explain the results, and further research is needed.

Still, the study raises an interesting question: Could regularly challenging our brains with demanding mental activities help us maintain cognitive function as we grow older?

I thought of my son learning Chinese. Learning a language requires remembering vocabulary, recognizing patterns, and retrieving words when communicating. Just like I’m learning Russian now , these activities certainly engage the brain.

What makes my son's effort especially meaningful is his motivation. He is not learning Chinese simply to acquire another skill; he wants to pass his language and culture on to his son.

This is a good example of how the pursuit of brain health and the pursuit of something meaningful can go hand in hand. My son may gain more than the ability to speak Chinese. He is building a bridge between generations, giving his little boy access to another language and a deeper connection to his family heritage.

If learning Chinese helps keep his mind active, that is an added benefit. But the greatest reward may be the bond he builds with his son, one word at a time.

10/19/2026

For the past few days, I have been writing about The Wisest One in the Room: How You Can Benefit from Social Psychology’s Most Powerful Insights (2015), by Thomas Gilovich and Lee Ross.

Today, something someone said made me wonder: Why did the authors feel the need to write a book about wisdom? Is it because becoming wise is so difficult? If wisdom were easy to acquire, perhaps there would be little need for a book about it.

The more I think about it, the more I realize that wisdom is not something we can gain easily like learning some math skills. Perhaps that is precisely why wisdom deserves a book of its own.

But there may be another reason wisdom is so difficult to attain: a paradox here, that is, the very intelligence that helps us understand the world can sometimes prevent us from recognizing that we are wrong.

The Chinese expression 自以为是 (zì yǐ wéi shì) captures this tendency among some smart people. It describes someone who assumes that, given their "high intelligence," their own views can't be wrong and they struggle to accept other perspectives.

Ironically, intelligence can sometimes make this tendency even stronger. A smart person may be skilled at constructing convincing arguments, but instead of using that ability to test an existing belief, they may use it to defend the belief against criticism. The better they become at arguing their case, the harder it may be for them to recognize their own mistakes.

I remember a relative telling me that her child once said to her, “Mom, you’re not qualified to talk to me about this if you haven’t read enough about it.”

That sounds a bit arrogant. This is written particularly for the younger generation: Reading and acquiring knowledge are certainly valuable and the young might master new knowledge faster than the older generation, but knowing more about a subject does not means you can dismiss another person's perspective. 

A person may have less knowledge about a particular topic and still have valuable life experience or insights to share. And it’s wise to listen to those you consider less knowledgeable than you. Would you dismiss your children’s words because they are not as educated as you are?

There is a Chinese saying that captures this paradox beautifully: 聪明反被聪明误 (cōng míng fǎn bèi cōng míng wù)—one's cleverness can be one's own undoing.

Of course there's a need to write a book about becoming the smartest one in the room. The world has no shortage of smart people. What it lacks is not intelligence, but the wisdom to use it well. That is why a book about becoming the wisest one in the room is worth reading!

10/18/2026

This is the final piece in my series sharing what I have learned from The Wisest One in the Room: How You Can Benefit from Social Psychology’s Most Powerful Insights (2015), by Thomas Gilovich and Lee Ross. I had planned to finish it yesterday, but the question of what it means to be wise made me want to linger a little longer on this book.

When a baby is born, people often compliment the baby by saying, “How smart!” This familiar reaction made me think of a related question: What is the difference between being smart and being wise?

First, intelligence and wisdom are different qualities.

Being smart is generally associated with intellectual abilities: learning quickly, grasping facts, solving problems, remembering information, and reasoning logically. Very often, intelligence is influenced by our natural abilities, something a person is born with.

Wisdom, on the other hand, involves more than intellectual ability. It includes self-awareness, an understanding of human nature, the ability to recognize situational forces, a willingness to question our own assumptions, and the judgment to consider long-term consequences. Wisdom develops not simply through accumulating experience but through reflecting on that experience, learning from mistakes, and correcting our biases.

A naturally intelligent person can therefore make foolish decisions. Knowing a great deal does not necessarily mean knowing what to do, when to do it, or whether doing it is worthwhile. I have seen many smart people doing foolish or unwise things, such as dating a girl while in a long relationship with another.

Second, wisdom is something we can actively cultivate and develop after birth.

We may not have much control over what our parents give us at birth, like our innate abilities, but we can work on becoming wiser. We can learn to recognize our blind spots, consider perspectives different from our own, and pause before making important judgments.

This is one reason I find the book valuable. Its insights are not merely concepts to understand; they are lessons we can apply in everyday life. For example, understanding channel factors and nudging can help us change our habits by making desirable actions easier, rather than relying entirely on willpower. Recognizing situational forces can help us understand other people's behavior before judging their character. And being aware of naïve realism can remind us that our own interpretation of a situation is not necessarily the only reasonable one.

The hardest part of these insights lies not just in understanding them but in putting them into practice.

Third, intelligence without wisdom can sometimes work against us.

A smart person may be excellent at analyzing a complex math problem and constructing a convincing argument, yet fail to recognize personal biases or consider the long-term consequences of a decision. 

Even worse and more dangerous, very often intelligence is even used to defend a poor decision rather than reconsider it.

Imagine someone who argues fiercely to prove that they are right, without considering the other person's perspective or the damage the argument may cause to their relationship. The person may be skilled at reasoning, but that skill alone does not guarantee good judgment.

Some smart parent may win an argument with a child by insisting on being right or having the final word, but winning the fight over his child often lose something more important: the child’s affection, and his willingness to communicate openly. Winning the battle does not necessarily mean winning the child’s heart.

A wise person is more willing to step back, consider both sides, and ask whether winning the argument is worth the cost. Wisdom also involves knowing which battles are worth fighting and which are better left alone.

When dealing with people, this kind of judgment often matters more in the long run than simply being the quickest thinker in the room.

To me, the distinction can be summed up this way: intelligence gives us tools for thinking; wisdom helps us decide how and when to use them. We may be born with huge intellectual ability, but making sound decisions requires self-awareness, perspective, and the humility to recognize that we may be wrong.

Ultimately, our gaol is to become the wisest one in the room, not the smartest.