Breaching colorism with my little girl sent me reeling back into my childhood shame. mostly sweet. After making our way through brushing teeth and getting into pajamas, my daughter and I lay down on her bedroom floor to sing songs, the final step before crawling into bed. When I tried to curl up next to my 4-year-old, though, I sensed …

Are humans born kind? We both assumed, as parents of young children, that kindness is just something our kids would pick up by osmosis, because we love them. It’s a common assumption. “We often just expect people to be kind without talking about it,” says Jennifer Kotler, vice president of research and evaluation at Sesame Workshop. “We think, ‘Oh, you’re …

Geoff and Ellie live in a suburban Chicago neighborhood that looks familiar from movies like Pretty in Pink and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off — both filmed in the area. They have three kids — Nathan, 5, Benji, 11, and Abby, 14 — and they’re worried that all three are too into their screens. An all-too-common experience Ninety-eight percent of families …

The family that plays video games together stays together. When parents become digital mentors, children can learn empathy and resilience and prepare for careers. From NPR’s Life Kit, Here are four ways to harness the advantages of screen time. 1. Whenever possible, share screens with your kids. With the littlest kids, treat screens like a picture book. As they get …

“Don’t chase me!” is one of my daughter’s favorite invitations. Of course, this is a cue to run shrieking through the house, grab her up in a fireman’s carry, hold her upside down and finally nosh on her legs as she mock-protests, “Don’t eat me! I’m a person, not a snack!” As part of the “Men in America” series on …

A new book argues that caring adult mentors are critical to students’ success in school and in life. Being a public school counselor can feel like barely contained chaos. In the large urban school where I worked, I was constantly interrupted by students in distress, lock-down drills, teachers who needed support, and parents seeking guidance. I often joked that the …

Every time Jennifer Tidd’s son was secluded or restrained at school, she received a letter from his teachers. Her son has autism and behavioral issues, and over three years — from 2013 to 2016 — Tidd got 437 of those letters. “I see this pile of documents that’s 5 inches tall that represents hundreds of hours of being locked into …

From surging hormones and acne to body hair and body odor, puberty can be a rocky transition for any kid. But girls and boys who start physically developing sooner than their peers face particular social and emotional challenges, researchers find. “Puberty is a pivotal time in kids’ lives, and early maturing boys and girls may be more likely to struggle …

At my baby’s six-month appointment a few months back, I got a one-pager from the pediatrician titled “Starting Solid Foods.” “It is critical that the baby develop a taste for rice cereal at the beginning, to offset the loss of iron from formula or breast milk,” it reads. Sounds serious. Then come the all caps: “THE FIRST TWO WEEKS OF …

It wasn’t hard for Shara Watkins to get pregnant. It was hard for her to stay pregnant. In 2016, she was devastated by two miscarriages. With the help of several medications, she successfully carried a child last year. Shara and her husband, Robert, were elated when she reached her second trimester, the phase when the highest risk of miscarriage subsides. …

With Rainbow Butterfly Unicorn Kitty on one side and bulbous-headed Fart Ninjas on the other, the gender divide was impossible to avoid at the North American International Toy Fair in New York City back in February. The light-up Barbie mermaids vying for space with Gatling-style foam-dart blasters in Manhattan’s Javits Center raised a question: Have toys really progressed since our …

Are doctors really clueless on how much sleep children need? That was the provocative premise of a study we reported on recently. It sparked a lot of attention from parents like me, who were left wondering where pediatricians come up those recommendations for hours of nightly sleep. It turns out that the study also sparked attention — no, let’s make …

Two afternoons a week, Mikala Tardy walks six blocks from Eastern High School to Payne Elementary School, not far from Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C. She signs in at the front desk just after 3:30 p.m. and makes her way to a classroom, where she’ll be tutoring second- and third-graders who are full of energy after the school day. Today, …

College-educated women in particular underestimate the demands of parenthood and the difficulties of combining working and parenting, new research shows. An economic mystery of the last few decades has been why more women aren’t working. A new paper offers one answer: Most plan to, but are increasingly caught off guard by the time and effort it takes to raise children. …

A study published Thursday in the Journal of Abnormal Psychology finds the percentage of U.S. teens and young adults reporting mental distress, depression and suicidal thoughts and actions has risen significantly over the past decade. While these problems also increased among adults 26 and older, the increase was not nearly as large as among younger people. Depression Treatment Raleigh Do …

There’s a before, and there’s an after. In the before, it was a relatively normal night. The kind of night any 14-year-old girl might have. Devyn ate dinner, watched TV and had small, unremarkable interactions with her family. Then, around 10 o’clock, she decided to turn in. “I went to bed as I normally would, and then all of a …

The first time Jessica Calise can remember her 9-year-old son Joseph’s anxiety spiking was about a year ago, when he had to perform at a school concert. He said his stomach hurt and he might throw up. “We spent the whole performance in the bathroom,” she recalls. After that, Joseph struggled whenever he had to do something alone, like showering …

Any kid with a cellphone or social media account is likely to be following one or more of thousands of social media influencers who regularly post about what they do, what they like and what they eat. Generally, these are people in their 20s who are successful, outgoing, positive, energetic and “highly appealing” to the younger crowd, according to Anna …

Death first visited me on a Thursday. I had a brown ‘n’ serve roll in my hand and a Vesuvius of buttered mashed potatoes on my plate. It was Thanksgiving and my 7th birthday, 1983. My grandmother sat across from me, my brother beside, my parents at the ends, but conspicuously absent under the table was our dog, Mingo, a …

I know she died, but when is Grandma coming back? Why is your skin darker than Mommy’s? Why do we live here but Daddy doesn’t? Are you the tooth fairy? Anyone with kids in their life knows what it’s like to be surprised by a tough question. It can come at any time, often when you least expect it: at …

Scouring ingredient lists. Carrying an EpiPen. Sitting at the special lunch table at school. These anxiety-ridden measures have become routine for families with severe food allergies, who know it takes only one wrong bite to end up in the emergency room. Nearly 6 million U.S. children and teens — about 8 percent, or two per classroom — have food allergies. …

Evidence is sorely lacking for the value of any over-the-counter remedy to treat most coughs. Americans spend almost $8 billion per year on over-the-counter cough and cold medicines, but despite their popularity, there is little-to-no evidence that these products can cure or shorten the duration of a cough. A lack of evidence in favor of cold medicine About 30 million …

Sometimes a psychiatric crisis can be triggered by something small. For Alexia Phillips, 21, it was a heated argument with a close family member in February 2017. She remembers the fight blew up before she left the house to go to classes at Queens College in Flushing, New York. By midday, Phillips, then a sophomore, says she began to cry …

Distrust of vaccines may be almost as contagious as measles, according to medical anthropologist Elisa Sobo. More than 100 people have been infected with measles this year, according to the Centers for Disease Control. Over 50 of those cases have occurred in southwest Washington state and northwest Oregon in an outbreak that led Washington Gov. Jay Inslee to declare a …

It’s the middle of the night and you wake up to the disturbing sound of your little one crying and sniffling with a cold, sore throat or fever. And, if you’re like many parents, you reach into the medicine cabinet, seeking some relief. But giving medication — and getting the dose right — can be more challenging than you might …

Killer whales, Japanese aphids and Homo sapiens — they’re among the few organisms whose females live on long past the age of reproduction. Since the name of the evolutionary game is survival and reproduction, the phenomenon begs explanation — why live longer than you can reproduce? In the 1960s, researchers came up with the “grandmother hypothesis” to explain the human …

Hollywood’s version of science often asks us to believe that dinosaurs can be cloned from ancient DNA (they can’t), or that the next ice age could develop in just a few days (it couldn’t). But Pixar’s film Inside Out is an animated fantasy that remains remarkably true to what scientists have learned about the mind, emotion and memory. The film …

Chronic pain is just one health concern women can struggle with after giving birth. Some who have complicated pregnancies or deliveries can experience long-lasting effects to their physical and mental health, researchers find. Melody Lynch-Kimery had a fairly routine pregnancy. But when she got to the hospital for delivery, she says, things quickly turned frightening. After an emergency cesarean section, …

Lisa Abramson says that even after all she has been through — the helicopters circling her house, the snipers on the roof, and the car ride to jail — she still wants to have a second child. That’s because right after her daughter was born in 2014 — before all that trouble began — everything felt amazing. Lisa was smitten, …

Rest assured, you can learn not to lose it during your child’s tantrums (and to prevent meltdowns in the future). If you are the parent to a toddler or preschooler, then you know: Tantrums happen. Sometimes, try as you might, there is simply no avoiding an epic meltdown, whether it’s at mealtime (no, just because you add milk to a …