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I think that education really is one of the best and cheapest answers that we have. 

 Paul and I have actually started working on an education project geared towards health curricula in schools.  Currently the health curricula in this country teach kids what is healthy and what is not healthy.  For example, eat your vegetables (not too much fat) , don't do drugs and don't have unprotected sex  or don't have sex before marriage - depending on the school district.   

The problem with these approaches is that they don't really prepare kids to make the tough choices that they will have to face in life. Many of these kids sit through all of these health classes and then go out smoke a joint, eat a cheeseburger and have unsafe sex.  Why?  What's wrong with our approach?

I think the main problem is that we aren't giving them a real sense of who they are, how they make choices and  the ways in which their unconscious might lead them towards certain behaviors.

Several years ago, while running a summer camp, I started experimenting with teaching kids about the brain. In little doses I started introducing it into parts of the program that I was directly running.  Right away the response was overwhelmingly positive.  

The kids were hungry to think about this stuff.  I had to cut off conversations that would have gone on for hours. Kids would approach me days later to pick up on some point that we had discussed.

I realized reason it was working was because I was opening a door for them to ask pressing questions about themselves.  Who am I? Why do I behave the way I do? Why might other people behave the way they do?  

These were not abstract academic discussions, these were urgent pressing issues to the teens I worked with.

I think that we need to teach kids about their brain and empower them as moment-to-moment investigators of their own consciousness and creators of their own stories.