Rating: 
Summary: A wonderful,insightful and thought provoking book
Review: As a physician I urge every parent to read this book.Turn off the TV!! Spend time with your children. MAKE THEM READ, FOR HOURS AT A TIME! (just like they now sit in front of the TV or nintendo,for hours at a time.) I love her conclusions,and if every one is not YET proven scientific fact, I believe most of her conclusions will eventually be supported by research. It is all good advice and observation in any case.
Rating: 
Summary: Pure bunk. Infectious nonsense. Hooey posing as science.
Review: As if U.S. schools were not saturated with enough child-damaging fads (whole language, constructivism, discovery learning, developmentally appropriate practices), Healy comes along and tries to provide a "scientific" foundation for faddish twaddle by deriving instructional practices from brain research that is considered questionable by brain researchers themselves. It's this sort of bunk that really endangers our children's minds.
Rating: 
Summary: Unsubstantiated and belabored.
Review: Despite the claim of the subtitle, the author can never really tell us why children don't think and what we can do about it. Every word of this book may be true; unfortunately, very little is substantiated. If repetition and anecdote proved anything, this would be a masterpiece. As it is, the book is four times the length it needs to make the points it makes.Until social scientists can unscramble the myriad of possible factors, e.g., single parenting, TV, video games, fluoride, we are just whistling Dixie. It is not even clear that there is a problem. I thought the author dismissed the Flynn Effect too matter of factly.
Rating: 
Summary: Endangered Minds
Review: Healy raises alot of issues that I would never have thought about. i.e. How brain wave monitors were hooked up to kids watching tv and what happens. That kids attention span over the decades are eroding and she believes TV, with it's fast base shows have alot to do with it. There are so many good issues that I would recommend highly this book and 95% of the material. I have begun to monitor the amount of time my son watches TV, due to this book. One drawback I have is her write up of the Superbabies on page 242 and how she somehow associates parents who do flash cards with baby that have no time to play. She doesn't realize that it takes only 5 seconds to show a baby 5 words. Babies are SMARTER than adults. Look how fast they pick up their language just by us talking to them. Read Glenn Doman's book "How to Teach Your Baby to Read" and you understand that flashcards must be associated with joy or don't do it at all.
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Summary: Parents: If You REALLY Care for Your Kids
Review: Healy's basic premise in this book is that human minds undergo actual physical changes with external stimuli, with different kinds of learning and stimuli producing different effects. She also attempts to show that while the human mind is pretty plastic, it is not infinitely so in that some physical characteristics of the brain are more or less fixed by the time the child reaches adolescence. With this premise, she attempts to relate how a juvenile mind constantly exposed to fast-paced but unmeaningful visual stimuli (the average TV show) is not prepared adequately to face the demands of school. Thus the worsening of reading skills of today's schoolkid, the increasing prevalence of ADHD and tuned-out kids, or kids who just don't think. Her arguments are often backed with scientific research, although a good amount of the evidence is anecdotal where scientific data is lacking, mostly gleaned from neuro-scientists and educators with strong suspicions. Her case on the whole is rather strong and convincing. The solution in short for parents: good ol' fashioned reading and spending time on meaningful communication with your kids, and turn off that TV! Okay, at least severely limit TV-time, since Healy does name a couple of suitable children's shows (Sesame Street is NOT recommended!). I would recommend this book for parents and educators. For parents, if you REALLY care for your kids, and are willing to make sacrifices for them. Otherwise don't read this book.
Rating:
Summary: Giving Kids a Great Start
Review: I read this book over 8 years ago. It really opened my mind to how I wanted to raise my children with respect to television, family time, over commitments, and developmental learning. I have two children ages 8 and 10. They are both at the top of their respective classes, they love to learn and they love to read. They are able to carry-on intelligent conversation at the dinner table and with others that they deal with. They had very little TV exsposure as pre-schoolers, and now TV is limited to the weekends only. I credit this book with guiding me to be a better parent in regards to their academic development. I recommend this book to any new parent. Gain control of the TV and computer games before they take hold of your children's minds.
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Summary: Definately a "must read" for parents and teachers.
Review: I would highly recommend this book to both parents and teacher alike. Healy maintains an interesting writing style throughout the text, and actively engages her audience. While I do feel the text is rather long, it doesn't dissolve into random banter. The book stays focused until the end, providing many provoking lines of thought. For instance: Since the introduction of standardized schooling over a hundred years ago, the rate of literacy has radically declined. How did we go from a nation of unschooled but highly literate people, to a nation of overschooled and illiterate people? Such illuminations, beg discussion.
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Summary: If you let your kids watch "good TV", don't read this book
Review: If you are an advocate of letting your children watch "good TV", like PBS, this book will be a hard pill to swallow. I read it years ago, and loved it. I occasionally go back and reread a passage or two. She discusses brain development in children at great length. She cites some of the studies that indicate that children who view Sesame Street on a regular basis, express shorter attention spans than those who do not view such programming. I liked much of the in-depth physiological brain developmental information.
Rating:
Summary: If you let your kids watch "good TV", don't read this book
Review: If you are an advocate of letting your children watch "good TV", like PBS, this book will be a hard pill to swallow. I read it years ago, and loved it. I occasionally go back and reread a passage or two. She discusses brain development in children at great length. She cites some of the studies that indicate that children who view Sesame Street on a regular basis, express shorter attention spans than those who do not view such programming. I liked much of the in-depth physiological brain developmental information.
Rating:
Summary: Important content, less than riviting style
Review: The difficulty I had with this book is the impression I got that the author did research on a variety of areas relating to brain development and then loosely connected these areas in broader sections. I got lost in some of the data and conclusions, and would sometimes forget what the point of a given section was. She seemed to take too many different directions to prove her point, as opposed to having information that built upon itself. Having said that, I did find many of Healy's conclusions important, e.g., what is taught in school today is not what is important, but what is easy to measure. She also educated me on the importance of "Whole-language" learning for children, which I don't necessarily agree with and is controversial in my state, Massachusetts. Concerning television, she devotes a whole chapter to condemning Sesame Street. I agree with this assessment, but thought the subject was better exposed in Marie Winn's "The Plug-In Drug" mainly because the latter described the marketing techniques employed by the program. My favorite chapter was the last, where she explores the future of human brains. Some provocative food for thought is mentioned like: "now, with a flood of data available, the educated mind is not the one that can master facts, but the one able to ask the winnowing question." The detriment of television on developing children is difficult to prove, I'm learning from reading this book and other similar material. The lack of research on the effects of television is alarming to the author and to me. She has convinced me that television does affect brain development and needs to be better understood. But even the steps to proceed to more understanding are not being taken, which is suspicious.
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