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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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, …

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, …

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 …

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 …

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!). …

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 …

“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, …

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. …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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. …

When Jolie Ritzo was looking for day care for her son Cannon in Falmouth, Maine, she checked out as many centers as she could. She was looking for a place with the right feel. “Most importantly, the people who are providing the care are loving and kind, nurturing and interested in developing these little beings,” she says. There was one …

“If something on their desk or in their pocket dings, rings or vibrates — they will lose focus.” “Students are doing so much in class, distraction and disruption isn’t really something I worry about.” How should teachers — both K-12 and college — deal with the use of computers and phones by students in class? On the one hand, those …

Cold and flu season means plenty of parents are trying to figure out whether their kid is too sick to go to child care or school. It’s not always an easy call. Day care centers for younger children often have exclusion policies laying out exactly which symptoms should keep kids at home — more on those in a minute. But …

Earlier this year, when Emily Chodos was about 25 weeks into her pregnancy, she woke up one night feeling horrible. “My hands were tremoring, my heart racing, ” recalls Chodos, who lives near New Haven, Conn. She couldn’t take a deep breath. “I’d never felt so out of control of my body.” She ended up paging her obstetrician’s office at …

It’s no secret that we’ve had a rough fall and winter with natural disasters. Even as we write this, fires burn in Southern California, adding to the previous wildfires in the northern part of the state that burned over 245,000 acres in October. Hurricanes Irma and Harvey devastated communities across Florida and Texas, while touching communities in Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee, …

Spanking looks to be instantly effective. If a child is misbehaving—if he keeps swearing, or playing with matches—and then you spank that child, the behavior stops immediately. The effect is so apparently obvious that it can drive a sort of delusion. Lived experience tends to be more powerful than facts. One of the few memories that many people retain from …

Parents these days are stressed. So are their kids. The root of this anxiety, one scholar says, is the way we understand the relationship between parents and children. Alison Gopnik, a psychology and philosophy professor at the University of California, Berkeley, thinks parents—especially middle-class parents—view their children as entities they can mold into a specific image. “The idea is that …

In 2001, not long after Oklahoma had adopted one of the nation’s first universal pre-K programs, researchers from Georgetown University began tracking kids who came out of the program in Tulsa, documenting their academic progress over time. In a new report published in the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management today, researchers were able to show that Tulsa’s pre-K program …

Establishing causal links when experiments are not feasible is an important challenge for psychology researchers. The question of whether parents’ spanking causes children’s externalizing behavior problems poses such a challenge because randomized experiments of spanking are unethical, and correlational studies cannot rule out potential selection factors. This study used propensity score matching based on the lifetime prevalence and recent incidence …

If you’re in desperate need for some good news, look no further. Scientists in the U.S. and India have found an inexpensive treatment that could possibly save hundreds of thousands of newborns each year. And it turns out, the secret weapon was sitting in Asian kitchens all along: probiotic bacteria that are common in kimchi, pickles and other fermented vegetables. …

Mil Schooley, an 18-year-old student in Denver says most of her friends have a JUUL — an e-cigarette that can vanish into a closed fist. When asked roughly how many, she stumbles a bit. “I wanna say like 50 or 60 percent? I don’t know. Maybe it’s just the people I know. All my friends in college have one,” she …

Erin Roth faced a tough choice in 2015. She needed to select a school for one of her two daughters. And in Washington, D.C., where she lives, she faced a dizzying array of traditional and charter schools from which to choose. It’s a familiar problem for parents in areas with a lot of school choice: charter, magnet, traditional, progressive, project-based, …

It’s the time of year when kids are thinking about their holiday wish lists. So what’s a parent to do when a child, possibly a very young child, asks for a smartphone? We hear that smartphones can be addictive, that screen time can hurt learning, but can’t these minicomputers also teach kids about responsibility and put educational apps at their …