See Martin Holtmann and colleagues, “Bipolar disorder in children and adolescents in Germany: national trends in the rates of inpatients, 2000 – 2007,” Bipolar Disorders, volume 12, pp. 155 – 163, 2010, full text available online at http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1399-5618.2010.00794.x/full. Among adolescents, Holtmann and colleagues note that an adolescent in the United States is still much more likely (about 40 times more likely) to be diagnosed with bipolar disorder t...| Leonard Sax MD PhD | Physician, Psychologist, and Author
For the past thirty years, we have been subjected to the dogma that the best way to eliminate gender stereotypes is to ignore gender differences. This dogma was never based in data, but in ideology. And the result of thirty years of indoctrination in this dogma is that we have LOST ground on this parameter: from 34% in 1987 to 25% in 2021. In fact, the best way to get most girls excited about computer science is different from the best way to get most boys excited about computer science. For ...| Leonard Sax MD PhD | Physician, Psychologist, and Author
Over the past decade, rates of obesity have been pretty stable for American kids 6 to 18 years of age. But over the same decade, the fitness of American kids has declined significantly, even though the average kid hasn’t gotten any fatter. In 2014, researchers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) released the result of a study which compared the physical fitness of 12- to 15-year-olds in 2012 with 12- to 15-year-olds back in 1999 and 2000. They found that the average fitn...| Leonard Sax MD PhD | Physician, Psychologist, and Author
For the 1972 data, see Cheryl Fryar and colleagues, “Prevalence of obesity among children and adolescents: United States, trends 1963-1965 through 2009-2010,” published September 13 2012 by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, full text online at www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/hestat/obesity_child_09_10/obesity_child_09_10.htm. For the 2020 data, see the CDC page “Childhood obesity facts,” https://www.cdc.gov/obesity/data/childhood.html, accessed January 3 2023.| Leonard Sax MD PhD | Physician, Psychologist, and Author
Compared with a teenager in the United Kingdom, a teenager in the United States is about how likely to be diagnosed with ADHD?| Leonard Sax MD PhD | Physician, Psychologist, and Author
There is no innate difference in the ability of girls and boys to master a foreign language; but in the United States, there is now a big gender gap in motivation. In other words: the biggest differences between girls and boys are not in what they can do but in what they want to do. In my visits to more than 460 schools over the past 22 years, I have learned a great deal about how to boost boys’ motivation in modern foreign languages as well as in English literature and creative writing, hi...| Leonard Sax MD PhD | Physician, Psychologist, and Author
Compared with children in Italy, children in the United States are about how likely to be on prescription antipsychotic medications such as Risperdal and Seroquel?| Leonard Sax MD PhD | Physician, Psychologist, and Author