5 Proven Benefits Of Play

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It may be a new school year, yet I come to sing the praises of trampolines and bubble-blowing, pillow forts and peekaboo, Monopoly and Marco Polo. A new paper in the journal Pediatrics summarizes the evidence for letting kids let loose. “Play is not frivolous,” the paper insists, twice. “It is brain building.” The authors — Michael Yogman, Andrew Garner, …

The Absolute Necessity of the New-Mom Friend

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My friend Cathy and I recently took an afternoon off and got a couples massage. We lay side by side in a small candlelit room, almost completely naked and entirely at ease. It was the third time we had met in person. In February 2017, our mutual friend, Steph, introduced us over email. Steph’s first child had just been born. …

Coloring Books And Worksheets: What’s The Value Of ‘Staying In The Lines’?

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Crayons, of course. Scented markers. Colored pencils, presharpened. And coloring books by the jillions. Why do people like coloring so much? For grown-ups, I can totally get the nostalgia — and the simple pleasure of creating something. But here at NPR Ed, we’re all about kids and learning. And so, as parents head to the store this summer with their …

Make Your Daughter Practice Math. She’ll Thank You Later.

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The way we teach math in America hurts all students, but it may be hurting girls the most. For parents who want to encourage their daughters in STEM subjects, it’s crucial to remember this: Math is the sine qua non. You and your daughter can have fun throwing eggs off a building and making papier-mâché volcanoes, but the only way …

How To Spark Learning Everywhere Kids Go

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Picture this: You’re in the supermarket with your hungry preschooler in tow. As you reach into the dairy case, you spot a sign with a friendly cartoon cow. It reads: “Ask your child: Where does milk come from? What else comes from a cow?” In a small study published last year, signs like these, placed in Philadelphia-area supermarkets, sparked a …

Raising Brilliant Kids — With Research To Back You Up

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“Why are traffic lights red, yellow and green?” When a child asks you a question like this, you have a few options. You can shut her down with a “Just because.” You can explain: “Red is for stop and green is for go.” Or, you can turn the question back to her and help her figure out the answer with …

Scared Of Math? Here’s One Way To Fight The Fear

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Do you remember the day you decided you were no good at math? Or maybe you had the less common, opposite experience: a moment of math excitement that hooked you for good? Thousands of studies have been published that touch on the topic of “math anxiety.” Overwhelming fear of math, regardless of one’s actual aptitude, affects students of all ages, …

When Parents Push Too Hard, Or Not Enough

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As a parent, did you ever push your child in ways you now regret – or not push enough? Or when you were a child, did you ever feel pushed too hard or not enough? These were the questions we posed to you, our audience, at the conclusion of our story highlighting a troubling situation in Ghana: Parents in the …

A Sibling Fight Survival Guide

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Angry footsteps upstairs. Screams. “I hate you!” Slam. Fists, on a bedroom door. Then, inevitably, the unified shriek: “MOOOOMMM!” That was the soundtrack of the year when my daughters were 11 and 12, shared a bedroom and fought like caged tigers. As a parent, I was at a loss. It seemed as though every meal or car ride ended in …

Your Best Parenting Advice, ‘We are all winging it’

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What do you wish you’d known before becoming a parent? In May, we asked our audience this question at the start of How To Raise A Human, our month-long special series on how to make parenting easier. More than 1,000 moms and dads opened up about the struggles and joys of raising children of all ages, from babies to adults, …

Stay-At-Home Dads Still Struggle With Stigma And Isolation

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The number of men in the United States who are full-time, stay-at-home parents has risen steadily in recent decades, from maybe a million or so in 1984, according to a Pew Research Center estimate, to roughly double that in 2014. That’s still much smaller than the number of stay-at-home moms, of course, and many of the challenges these dads face …

Surviving Sex Ed Today

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It’s after hours at Rafael Hernandez, an elementary school in the Bronx, and Room 421 is in an uproar. It’s what you would expect from a sixth-grade sex education class learning how to put a condom on. Sex education: The very concept makes a lot of people cringe, conjuring images of teenage giggles and discomfort. It’s also a subject a …

The Perils Of Pushing Kids Too Hard

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On New Year’s Eve, back in 2012, Savannah Eason retreated into her bedroom and picked up a pair of scissors. “I was holding them up to my palm as if to cut myself,” she says. “Clearly what was happening was I needed someone to do something.” Her dad managed to wrestle the scissors from her hands, but that night it …

Parents, Schools Step Up Efforts To Combat Food-Allergy Bullying

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Bullying takes many forms, but when it involves a food that triggers severe allergies, it could be potentially deadly. Once, when Brandon Williams, a 16-year-old from Kentucky, was on a trip with his bowling team, his teammate decided to eat some food from McDonald’s on Williams’ bed. One item had so much mayonnaise that it dripped onto Williams’ bed and …

Should More Women Give Birth Outside The Hospital?

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A recent recommendation from doctors in the United Kingdom raised eyebrows in the United States: The British National Health Service says healthy women with straightforward pregnancies are better off staying out of the hospital to deliver their babies. That’s heresy, obstetrician Dr. Neel Shah first thought. In the United States, 99 percent of babies are born in hospitals. “There’s really …

Is Sleeping With Your Baby As Dangerous As Doctors Say?

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Six months ago, Melissa Nichols brought her baby girl, Arlo, home from the hospital. And she immediately had a secret. “I just felt guilty and like I didn’t want to tell anyone,” says Nichols, who lives in San Francisco. “It feels like you’re a bad mom. The mom guilt starts early, I guess.” Across town, first-time mom Candyce Hubbell has …

How Moms Can Cultivate Positive Emotions

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Stress can undermine our best parenting intentions, but new research suggests a way to reduce its impact. I was looking at Mother’s Day cards recently and found a couple that made me chuckle. One suggested a cape as a gift for a super mom. The other had a presidential seal for the mom-in-chief. Their common theme? The idea that moms …

There’s no other way to put it: Maria de los Angeles Tun Burgos is a supermom.

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She’s raising five children, does housework and chores — we’re talking about fresh tortillas every day made from stone-ground corn — and she helps with the family’s business in their small village about 2 1/2 hours west of Cancún on the Yucatán Peninsula. Sitting on a rainbow-colored hammock inside her home, Burgos, 41, is cool as a cucumber. It’s morning, …

Why So Many Gifted Yet Struggling Students Are Hidden

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Scott Barry Kaufman was placed in special education classes as a kid. He struggled with auditory information processing and with anxiety. But with the support of his mother, and some teachers who saw his creativity and intellectual curiosity, Kaufman ended up with degrees from Yale and Cambridge. Now he’s a psychologist who cares passionately about a holistic approach to education, …

Why Attachment Parenting Is Not the Same as Secure Attachment

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Parents who embrace attachment parenting can be distressed when they can’t live up to its ideals. They shouldn’t be. In the months leading up to birth, a pregnant woman begins to read about childrearing, including a book called Attachment Parenting by pediatrician William Sears and registered nurse Martha Sears. They advocate for a collection of seven practices they call the …

When Teens Cyberbully Themselves

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During the stressful teen years, most adolescents experience emotional highs and lows, but for more than 20 percent of teenagers, their worries and sad feelings turn into something more serious, like anxiety or depression. Studies show that 13 percent to 18 percent of distressed teens physically injure themselves via cutting, burning or other forms of self-harm as a way to …

How to Help Your Kids Get Organized Without Nagging

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Positive encouragement and patience are key to helping your child learn organizational skills. Brush your teeth!” “Where are your socks?” “Don’t forget to bring a sweatshirt!” “Where’s the homework you finished last night?” Too often, weekday mornings can seem like a race against the clock. When your alarm goes off, you start out with the best of intentions (serenity now!). …

How to Reduce the Impact of Childhood Trauma

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Children who experience adversity tend to have health problems later in life. Dr. Nadine Burke Harris explains why—and how we can help heal those wounds. When Dr. Nadine Burke Harris set up the Bayview Child Health Center in 2007, she immediately noticed an association between traumatic experiences and health outcomes in the children she treated. “Day after day I saw …

How To Find A School Your Kids Will Love (And That You Will, Too)

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“Creativity now is as important in education as literacy, and we should treat it with the same status.” That’s one of the many quotes that has made Sir Ken Robinson’s 2006 lecture on rethinking the nation’s schools become one of the most popular TED talks — with more than 50 million views. Over the past two decades, Robinson, an author, …

Making Elementary School A Lot More Fun

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In Kelly Stevens’ kindergarten classroom, each day begins with circle time for what sounds like a menu of lesson options. Students — or “friends” as Stevens calls them — can read at the green table, they can build boats or make things out of clay, among other options. Students Marco Carias Castellanos and Holden Free chose a writing activity today. …

Rethinking How Students With Dyslexia Are Taught To Read

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Dyslexia is the most common learning disability, affecting tens of millions of people in the United States. But getting help for children who have it in public school can be a nightmare. “They wouldn’t acknowledge that he had a problem,” says Christine Beattie about her son Neil. “They wouldn’t say the word ‘dyslexia.’ ” Other parents, she says, in the …

Grief In The Classroom

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Deborah Oster Pannell’s husband died when her son, Josiah, was 6 years old. That week, Pannell visited Josiah’s school and, with his teacher and guidance counselor, explained to his first-grade class what had happened. “I’ll never forget the three of us sitting up there — and all these little shining faces looking up at us — talking about how Josiah …

What Kids Need From Grown-Ups (But Aren’t Getting)

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Erika Christakis’ new book, The Importance of Being Little, is an impassioned plea for educators and parents to put down the worksheets and flash cards, ditch the tired craft projects (yes, you, Thanksgiving Handprint Turkey) and exotic vocabulary lessons, and double-down on one, simple word: Play. That’s because, she writes, “the distinction between early education and official school seems to …

The Key To Raising A Happy Child

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For much of the past half-century, children, adolescents and young adults in the U.S. have been saying they feel as though their lives are increasingly out of their control. At the same time, rates of anxiety and depression have risen steadily. What’s the fix? Feeling in control of your own destiny. Let’s call it “agency.” “Agency may be the one …

Screen Addiction Among Teens

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Look up from this screen right now. Take a look around. On a bus. In a cafe. Even at a stoplight. Chances are, most of the other people in your line of sight are staring at their phones or other devices. And if they don’t happen to have one out, it is certainly tucked away in a pocket or bag. …