Jenny Anderson

During his two terms as governor of Wisconsin, Republican Scott Walker professed to be an advocate for education even as he cracked down on the teachers’ union, leading to lower pay, reduced benefits, and higher staff turnover in schools. On Tuesday’s midterms, Wisconsin voters ousted Walker in favor of very different kind of education advocate: Tony Evers, a former teacher and Wisconsin’s superintendent of public instruction.

I genuinely hope that my daughters do not become marathon runners. It’s terrible on the knees, takes up a lot of time and can be quite solitary.

Copenhagen is renowned for being a bike-friendly city. At rush hour, parents navigate major roads with kids in their bikes or cycling beside them. There’s a famous “traffic playground,” where kids under eight go to learn to ride a bike in a mini-version of the city, with traffic lights and pedestrian walkways and other urban features. In 2016, 41% of trips to work and school in Copenhagen took place on bicycles; the city’s goal, by 2025, is 50%.

It should come as no surprise that advertisers want you to watch their ads. It may, however, irk you to discover that apps for kids aged five and under are also packed with ads that researchers describe as manipulative, disruptive, and not at all age-appropriate.

Heidi Vikkelsø Nielsen needed to find an image to show what childhood looks like in her country. The former teacher and current professor of education in Denmark settled on one of a young girl gleefully wielding a very sharp saw. “I think it captures perfectly how we think about childhood,” she says.

Nearly 110 million people around the world turn to Jeanne Phillips’ widely-syndicated “Dear Abby” column for advice on everyday issues. But some of her recent counsel has critics saying that Phillips is woefully uninformed and out-of-date when it comes to matters of cultural diversity.

Postal workers in Britain will soon be delivering a dose of compassion alongside the mail.

Vivek Murthy know what it’s like to be lonely.

In January, UK prime minister Theresa May appointed a minister for loneliness. Today, the government announced a government-wide strategy to tackle the issue.

When Julianne Holt-Lunstad first began studying how relationships influence our physical health two decades ago, some of her colleagues scoffed at the topic. ”They thought it was fluff,” says Holt-Lunstad, a professor of psychology at Brigham Young University. 

Don’t mess with libraries.

Many of us think the college or university we attend matters a lot. If we go to Harvard, or Oxford, we will be happier, smarter, richer and land a killer job. A new report from Challenge Success, a nonprofit that is part of Stanford’s Graduate School of Education, suggests this thinking is almost entirely wrong. 

With the sexual assault allegations against Supreme Court justice nominee Brett Kavanaugh dominating the headlines, figuring out how to talk to younger kids about the news can feel fraught. How do you explain assault before a child really understands sex?

Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee today was searing. Visibly terrified and audibly shaken, she was resolute while recounting the experience of a sexual assault so terrifying she thought she might die. When asked about her most enduring memory of the alleged assault by Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, she reverted to the language of science, to heartbreaking effect. ”Indelible in the hippocampus was the laughter,” she said. In other words, what she’s most remembered from the assault that cast a shadow over the rest of her life was the sound of two boys laughing while they tried to muffle her screams.

In the UK, the kids are not all right—at least, the girls aren’t as happy as they could be.

For all the progress men and women have made on gender equality, it sometimes feels like few inroads have been made at all.

Rich kids enjoy a lot of advantages over poorer ones—and new research shows that grade inflation may provide the children of privileged parents with yet another edge.

A reporter recently asked me: What did you eat for breakfast on September 15th? He was writing a 10-year anniversary piece on the financial crisis which I covered for the New York Times. It was a reasonable question—one that we reporters lob at subjects all the time.

Like many seven-year-olds, Emil Rustige gets ticked off when his parents pay attention to their phones instead of him. But unlike other kids, Emil decided to take the issue to the streets.

Either teens are delusional about their social media use, or adults are freaking out over nothing. That seems to be one conclusion of Common Sense Media’s 2018 Social Media, Social Life survey, which polled a nationally representative group of more than 1,000 US teens on use of and feelings about Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat and their ilk.

My oldest daughter turns 10 this month. I say this with disbelief, as I am under the mistaken impression that I am still new to parenthood—and that I have ample time to improve at it. I’m still eagerly awaiting the day when I stop second-guessing the millions of decisions I make every day, which may or may not influence who she and her younger sister become.

I always love scrolling through my family’s glorious pictures on the first day of school—when the kids are well-dressed and smiling, backpacks slung on their shoulders, with nary a shred of evidence of rush or hassle.

British researchers plan to present a paper to the Royal Geographical Society this week arguing that employers should start counting daily commutes as time on the clock. The group studied 5,000 rail passengers on commuter routes into London and found a majority were using the time to catch up on work emails. “How do we count that time? Do workplace cultures need to change?” Juliet Jain, one of the paper’s authors, said to the BBC. (Jain did not respond to a request for comment.)

When adults feel stressed out, they might pour themselves a glass of wine or smoke a cigarette, or maybe do some yoga. But a new report shows that British teenagers who are under pressure often turn to self-harm, with girls more than twice as likely as boys to say they intentionally hurt themselves in the past year.