Students from March for our Lives, including survivors of the Parkland shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida, are hitting the road, embarking on a 60-day, 20-state, 75-stop summer bus tour to register young people to vote and push gun control laws.
Having a baby is hard, and learning to breast-feed immediately afterwards can be trying for many new moms. You’re tired, sore, and hormonal. And when things don’t go smoothly—the kid won’t latch on, or your nipples are raw and bleeding—you panic, because you’re failing at something for which evolution has clearly made sure you’re equipped.
South Korean students perform well on international tests. But like students all over the world, they are less and less engaged with school. They just don’t like it.
Amid the existential issues of migration and the future of Europe lies a small corner of truancy that Germany is really cracking down on: The problem of parents who heist their kids out of school to secure cheaper holidays.
Listen to any politician anywhere, and you will hear that education is the salve for all social ills. Inequality? Education will make the poor upwardly mobile. Job automation? Teach students the skills that robots can’t replicate.
Overwhelming evidence shows that beating children harms them physically, mentally, emotionally and socially. And yet 19 US states still allow the corporal punishment, including in preschools, according to an EdWeek analysis of a huge new US database.
In the 1970s, three groundbreaking studies—in Jamaica, North Carolina and Michigan—changed the way the world thought about helping poor kids. The studies suggested that one way of reducing inequality and supporting families was to create high-quality infant and early childhood programs in homes and in child care centers, which had a dramatically positive impact on the kids involved, (and in some cases, on the parents too).
Facebook wants to be friends again.
“I consider work sacred,” Clayton Spencer, president of Bates College, said over coffee in London a few weeks ago. She wasn’t talking about her own job, though she clearly loves what she does. She was explaining her conviction that helping students find meaningful work should be an integral part of a liberal-arts education. ”If you get love and work right,” she said, paraphrasing Sigmund Freud, “you’ve sort of figured it all out.”
If you want to understand what it’s like to struggle with reading, take a look at the animation below.
Dear new Royal Baby (Arthur, or Albert, or Fredrick, or James, or Philip, as the bookmakers are predicting you will be called):
In his latest letter to shareholders, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos details the company’s march to global domination. The company employs 560,000 Amazonians—aka people—and Amazon Prime now has more than 100 million members, a figure greater than the population of Germany, Vietnam, or Egypt.
One of my children currently gets £1.50 a week in pocket money; the other, £2.50 (about $2.00 and $3.50). We encourage some pretty basic behaviors with these funds: save, spend, and donate. Jars, wallets, small bags, countertops, and backpacks act as various means of storage. But in our efforts to instill some financial literacy in our grade-school-age kids, we have committed a gross oversight: We failed to incorporate the blockchain.
Some people say that you can apply Marie Kondo to kids. De-clutter their rooms, and both you and your children will experience more joy.
By the age of three, wealthy children hear 30 million more words than their poor counterparts, according to a landmark 1995 study (pdf) by researchers Betty Hart and Todd Risley. The “30 million word gap” has since become shorthand for the gaping inequalities between high and low-income children. Hart and Risley also showed that the number of words kids heard by their third birthday strongly predicted kids’ academic success when they were nine. Clearly, it was important to talk to children—a lot.
There is no shortage of advice on how to raise kids today. Books, magazines, and websites offer tips on everything from managing kids’ sleep and diet to navigating friendships and screen time. But the parenting advice of the future may look a lot more like Muse—an AI-powered app that aims to use machine learning and big data to try and help parents raise creative, motivated, emotionally intelligent kids.
Homework is a fraught issue. Some people think it’s necessary to help kids learn; others think it’s a waste of time. And many parents are confused about how much they should get involved with their kids’ homework.
In the United States, men are doing more child care and housework than ever before—an average of 16 hours a week in 2015, according to the Pew Research Center. But that remains around half of what women do, at 33 hours a week.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is a big advocate of personalized learning—using technology to tailor learning to kids’ interests, abilities and pace of work. Now his philanthropic investment company is funding a major initiative to help struggling readers by applying personalized learning to children’s literacy.
How kids feel about school affects how they learn. Research shows that motivation (pdf) and mindset matter hugely when it comes to kids’ performance on tests—an admittedly narrow measure of learning, but one that is quantifiable.
Fears about automation displacing workers around the world ranked high on the list of Things to Be Very Worried About at the World Economic Forum in January. “At the end of the day, we have to fire a lot of people,” said Ursula Burns, chairman of the supervisory board at telecom group VEON, and former CEO of Xerox—which, indeed, recently had to fire a lot of people.
Wading through the research on technology and teens can feel fraught. Smartphones are either ruining our children, or a bunch of journalists and academics are blowing the whole thing out of proportion and the kids are mostly fine.
To many, teenagers are mercurial creatures. They can be moody and defiant, and seem to spend disproportionate amounts of time worrying about what others think of them. But all this angst and emotion can be harnessed for good, according to a new article published as part of a series in Nature and Scientific American about the importance of adolescence.
Children born into poverty start at a big disadvantage. To thrive, they need food, shelter, and health care. But a growing body of evidence shows there are other ways to help close the vast gap in development between poor kids and their wealthier peers—singing, talking, and playing with them.
