Jenny Anderson

Kids are famously tech-savvy compared to their luddite parents. But when it comes to fake news, they seem as confused as the rest of us.

Perseverance, or the ability to stick with something, is critical to success in life, from academics and sports to music and getting around to that presentation for tomorrow’s meeting.

Rachel Weinstein, a psychotherapist in Maine, thinks millennials are misunderstood.

K. Anders Ericsson has spent 30 years studying people who are exceptional at what they do, and trying to figure out how they got to be so good. His conclusion: in most cases, talent doesn’t matter—practice does.

Per-Erik Muskos, a 42-year-old local council member for Övertorneå in northern Sweden, proposed this week that Swedes should take a one-hour paid break from work to go home and have sex with their partners.

Kids with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) are often believed to simply be difficult, and parents often feel they have failed their child in some way.

When Joan Costa-Font became a father, the health economist noticed a dramatic drop in his productivity. “And I am the man,” he said, acknowledging that the effect was clearly worse on his wife.

Math is a notoriously hard subject for many kids and adults. There is a gender gap, a race gap, and just generally bad performance in many countries.

As if Brexit wasn’t enough to cope with, Britain is in the throes of a vegetable crisis.

Parents hoping for something safer than Instagram, take solace: Lego has introduced a social network for under 13s which does not allow kids to upload human photos or write snarky and/or inappropriate comments.

According to the New America Foundation, jihadists killed 94 people inside the United States between 2005 and 2015. During that same time period, 301,797 people in the US were shot dead, Politifact reports.

When some researchers read a group of five-year-olds a story about a person who was “really, really smart,” and then asked what gender the protagonist was, the girls overwhelmingly picked girls and the boys overwhelmingly picked boys. But by age six, that had changed, with significantly fewer girls picking their own gender compared to boys who still favored theirs, suggesting that stereotypes of men’s “natural” or “innate” brilliance start very young.

In 1938, Finland started offering low-income mothers a “maternity package,” a box filled with fabric to sew baby clothes, blankets and cloth diapers which doubled as a small crib for the baby’s first few weeks of life. Today, every Finnish mother, regardless of income, gets a baby box. When Finland introduced its baby boxes, the infant mortality rate was 65 deaths per 1,000 live births: Today it is 1.3 deaths per 1,000 births, one of the lowest in the world.

Creativity always ranks high in the skills children are thought to need to thrive in the workplace of the future. Since kids today are being educated for jobs that do not yet exist, they need to know how to think for themselves. Schools need to produce kids that are not job-seekers, but job-creators, the thinking goes.

US vice president Joe Biden defended NATO, extolled the virtues of transatlantic cooperation, and took a firm stand against Russia in a speech at the 2017 World Economic Forum in Davos.

Xi Jinping, China’s president, offered a robust defense of the Davos world order, positioning himself as globalization’s most vocal champion, and suggesting the system needed reform, not rebuke.

The World Economic Forum begins next week in Davos, where politicians, CEOs, celebrities meet to establish the conventional wisdom over fondue, cocktails, and high-minded debates.

In Britain, more than half of 12- to 15-year-olds are on Instagram, according to OfCom (pdf), the country’s communications regulator. So are 43% of 8- to 11-year-olds. But how many of them understand what they signed when they joined? Pretty much 0%, according to “Growing Up Digital”, a report released Jan. 5 (pdf) by the UK Children’s Commissioner.

In a bid to restore some semblance of work-life balance, French companies with more than 50 employees are now required to guarantee workers the “right to disconnect” from technology when they leave the office at night.

How long should women take off from work after having a baby? It’s a charged question. Scandinavians think women should have a lot of time; Americans seem to think women need little or no time at all. At the heart of the question is the effect on children: Does it help or hurt them to have a parent at home?

Here’s the way Christmas usually goes down in our family. On Christmas Eve, all the cousins —age range six to 24—gather around my mom, who reads The Night Before Christmas. Being of good grandmother stock, she reads the wholesome holiday tale with flourish. Someone secretly rings some bells, presents appear at the door, pandemonium ensues, and the littles all go off to bed.

I remember walking into my in-laws’ house for my first English Christmas. A fire was blazing inside the 800-year-old farmhouse nestled in the countryside, dinner was cooking, and teeny-tiny glasses of wine were on the table. A giant Christmas tree stood in the vaulted-ceiling granary, next to the hundred-year-old rocking horse and not far from a grand piano. We ate and sang, walked, sat by the fire. There was something about this richness of tradition that I cherished immediately and longed to pass on to my not-yet-existent kids.

The holidays may be the most magical time of the year, but they’re also fraught. Theres’ shopping to finish, packing to complete, last-minute work demands. If it’s tempting to simply plop your kids in front of the TV or iPad to while away the school break, here’s a suggestion: Don’t.

When it comes to happiness, Danes know what they’re talking about. Denmark ranked first among 156 countries in the latest World Happiness Report (pdf), which asked people to rate their happiness levels on a range of things, from income and social support to health expectations and trust in institutions.