Michael G. Thompson, Ph.D.

New York Times Bestselling Author and International Speaker

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Can Teachers And Parents Get Better At Talking To One Another?

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Michael Thompson was interviewed by Jessica Winter. The article appeared in the September 5, 2023 edition of the New Yorker Magazine.

Families are more anxious than ever to find out what happens in school. But there may be value in a measure of not-knowing and not-telling.”

The story can be read here: https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-education/can-teachers-and-parents-get-better-at-talking-to-one-another

Interview from the American School of Dubai

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Dr. Thompson flew to Dubai on February 5th to conduct  faculty workshops and speak to students at the American School of Dubai.  Over the course of three days he spoke to every student from fifth through twelfth grade in assemblies, he conducted three faculty workshops, and made three presentations to parents.  He was also a guest on the student television network, hosted by Alexa, a terrific (and well-prepared) interviewer.

Visit to the Ontario Camp Association conference in Toronto

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In mid-January I flew up to Toronto to speak to the Ontario Camp Association annual conference from my book Homesick and Happy: How Time Away from Parents Can Help a Child Grown. The combination of the words “camp” and “Ontario” has special significance for me because it was at a canoe tripping camp in that Canadian province that I first achieved a measure of the independence for which I yearned as a boy.  The summer after I turned fourteen I attended Camp Keewaydin, a legendary camp on Lake Temagami, three hundred miles north of Toronto.

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How does can the local culture affect the stress level of students?

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I have been traveling a lot this fall: three trips to California, three trips to North Carolina and one journey to the Netherlands. My trips have raised some interesting questions that I would like to share with my readers over the next few weeks.

My first question is:
To what extent an international school absorbs aspects of the local culture, and in particular, how does can the local culture affect the stress level of students?

In early October I flew to the Netherlands to speak and consult at two international schools: The American School of Amsterdam and the International School of the Hague. In both schools I spoke in assemblies to every student from 4th through 12th grades; I also addressed parents and teachers on a wide variety of topics. Because I had given my “Best Friends/Worst Enemies” talk to the then fifth and sixth graders at ISA two years ago, I was not going to reprise that topic with them as present-day seventh and eighth graders. Instead, I conducted the assembly based on my book The Pressured Child, asking the students about their sleep, their stress levels and their expectations for stress in the future. With the juniors and seniors at both schools I also asked questions about their sleep, the stress of college admissions, the demands of the IB and parental expectations. While my conversations hardly qualified as research, certainly not empirical research—I did not record any data—the conversations made me think about student stress or, in the case of the schools in Holland, the relative lack of stress in comparison to other international schools.

In short, the students at ASH and ISA are palpably less stressed compared with students at other international schools I have visited and the independent schools in the U.S. where I consult Would it surprise anyone to hear that Amsterdam is a lower-stress place than an independent school in Los Angeles or New York or Beijinjg or Shanghai? Probably not. What is interesting, however, is that the stress level is lower even though most of them are doing academic work which is equally demanding, namely the IB diploma.

The 7th and 8th graders at ISA weren’t getting as much sleep as I’d like to see. Two girls had had less than four hours of sleep on a Wednesday night. However, the average sleep amounts were higher than I would have encountered in a U.S. independent school.

No doubt the stress levels at ASH and ISA, will go up in during the diploma years. The seventh and eighth graders were expecting to be stressed-out and sleep-deprived in their last two years of high school. However, talking with the seniors in an assembly, I found them far less anxious about getting into college than I remembered from Zurich, Miami or Bangkok. Every day, a full four hundred students bicycle to the American School of the Hague, as do many of their teachers. They arrive at school having exercised, having been separate from their parents (no anxious conversations in the car about homework either done or not done) and having experienced the meditation of biking alongside the Dutch, everyone feeling safe, no one wearing helmets, on bike paths almost completely separate from cars. It is hard not to envy the Dutch way of life and to want to share in it.

Workshop for School Administrators in Honolulu, Hawaii

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In late July, Rob Evans and I traveled to the Punahou School in Honolulu to run a workshop for school administrators from all over Hawaii along with a couple from the West Coast. Because of Punahou’s annual Student Leadership conference was underway at the same time, Ruth Fletcher, the director of professional development for Punahou, invited their chaperones, all educators from India, China and Japan, to join our workshop. It was a challenge for us to make our examples of administrative problems from U.S. independent schools relevant for, say, a public school principal from Japan, but in the end the realities of school administration, the developmental stages of students and the nature of teachers allowed us to find common ground.

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Visit to Chautauqua

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I just spent two packed and exciting days at Chautauqua Institution in upstate New York. I had been hoping for an invitation from Chautauqua for four or five years, ever since Kathy and Jim Pender of Cleveland suggested that I would be a good fit for the audiences there. Chautauqua more than lived up to my expectations. Is there any more enthusiastic summer learning community anywhere in America?

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Do Fathers Matter?

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In January, Dr. Thompson was the keynote speaker for the “Do Fathers Matter?” parenting conference at the 92nd Street. He participated in a panel discussion focusing on new research on fathering which included sociologist Dr. Michael Kimmel, the author of “Guyland,” Paul Raeburn, the author of “Do Fathers Matter?” and Columbia Professor James Curley, a neuroscientist studying brain changes associated with parenting. [Read more…] about Do Fathers Matter?