By Laurence Telson*

Spare the rod and spoil the child!  Who in the Caribbean has not heard this cryptic biblical proverb that in itself brought swift punishment to one’s bottom for a crime once forgotten?

I am often told by my colleagues and friends that I am too harsh on myself and that I should have more self-compassion. I used to be quite unfamiliar with this concept. Self-compassion? Isn’t this a term people use to find excuses for themselves and be self-indulgent?

…Sang the famous Spanish singer-songwriter Joaquín Sabina in 1992, “do not try the liqueurs of pleasure, build muscles from five to six, and watch your cholesterol.” Beyond his ironic lyrics about the exaggerated obsession with finding the elixir to prolong life, Sabina’s song alluded to a new reality: the increase in life expectancy and the implications that entails.

A young woman in Mexico with Type II diabetes hears her phone buzz and sees a notification – “Rise in blood sugar detected – inject 6 units of rapid acting insulin now.”

A teenager in rural Lima struggling with depression logs into an app to talk online with a licensed therapist who lives thousands of miles away.

Estimates indicate that around 218 million children between 5 and 17 years of age perform some type of work. Of those, 10.7 million, or 1 in 19 children, live in Latin America and the Caribbean.

The day we visited the San Juan School in the Chiriqui province of Panama, the preschool students were laughing, dancing and singing. But their play was not unstructured; it followed a well-researched pedagogical sequence. These students are part of a new bilingual and intercultural preschool program called Ari Taen JADENKÄ (Let’s Count and Play, in Ngäbere) that helps children develop essential early mathematics skills.

Written in February 2016 to express the potential of the Pacific Alliance to improve effective learning in Latin America. When reading this article imagine it is the year 2030.

How do we make decisions when our lives are so complex? An increasingly popular way to approach this question is through behavioral sciences—the science of evaluating psychological, cognitive, emotional, cultural, neuroscience and social factors and their impact on decisions.