Tomorrow night, Fabrice Charles is planning to go to bed early, so he can get a good night’s sleep. He’s got a big day on Saturday, when he’ll join hundreds of thousands of other students taking the new summer SAT. “I get stressed really easily,” he says, “so I’ve just got to relax and think back to my exercises.” For …

In recent months, mothers who nearly died in the hours and days after giving birth have repeatedly told ProPublica and NPR that their doctors and nurses were often slow to recognize the warning signs that their bodies weren’t healing properly. A study published Tuesday in MCN: The American Journal of Maternal/Child Nursing substantiates some of those concerns. Researchers surveyed 372 …

Conflict between parents is inevitable—but it doesn’t have to hurt kids. Here’s how to turn a disagreement into a positive lesson. When I was a child, my parents’ fights could suck the oxygen out of a room. My mother verbally lashed my father, smashed jam jars, and made outlandish threats. Her outbursts froze me in my tracks. When my father …

It’s summer vacation season and many families will be lucky enough to be heading off for at least a few days. At least half of parents say quality time together is the most important reason to take a family vacation, according to a national survey by the rental car company Alamo. Still, there will inevitably be downtime: at airports, on …

Raising children is a task that requires extensive “on-the-job” training, which is why many women rely on new moms groups for parenting support and guidance. Often, however, as the kids get older, the mothers’ friendships fall by the wayside. Now, new research indicates that social support isn’t just valuable for mothers of young children, it’s beneficial for moms of teens, …

“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 …

Social activist Innosanto Nagara wanted to find a fun book to read to his 2-year-old son that also talked about the importance of social justice. He wasn’t looking for the typical fiction written for children, instead, he was looking for unique narratives — by writers of color and/or authors who can speak about social issues through their own experiences. Nagara …

Historically, it is very odd for business people – or indeed anyone with an executive role – to spend much of their day attending to the needs of their own children. People weren’t heartless, they just didn’t think that it was particularly good for children to spend a lot of time with their parents. There was a prevailing fear of …

Forgiveness heals hurts and is good for the forgiver—even the young one. Forgiveness has roots as both a spiritual and a secular teaching in Western culture. In the last 40 years, it has become a subject of academic study as researchers have investigated the impact of forgiving—and not forgiving—on the relationships, health, and happiness of those who have suffered a …

If you’ve ever gotten a glimpse inside a high schooler’s backpack or locker, you know organization doesn’t always come naturally to teens. Being scatterbrained in school can make make it tough to stay focused and do well. That was the case when Lilli Stordeur was about halfway through her freshman year of high school in Northampton, Mass. She felt totally …

Sometime between grade school and grad school, the brain’s information highways get remapped in a way that dramatically boosts self-control. Impulsive children become thoughtful adults only after years of improvements to the brain’s information highways, a team reports in Current Biology. A study of nearly 900 young people ages 8 to 22 found that the ability to control impulses, stay …

Women worry that bad things will happen if they exercise while pregnant, but doctors say in almost all cases it’s not just safe, but can improve health. Being pregnant can sometimes feel like traversing a minefield of advice: You want to do the right thing for your baby and yourself, but conflicting input from physicians, relatives, friends and even total …

When 18-year-old Hannah Vanderkooy feels extremely tired or anxious, she heads to a spacelike capsule for a nap — during school. Like many teens struggling to get good grades and maybe even a college scholarship, Vanderkooy doesn’t get enough sleep. And she’s not alone. Various studies indicate that chronically sleepy and stressed-out teenagers might be the new normal among U.S. …

“Tiger” parents may drive kids’ brains to overreact to errors.In an age when the formula for success seems infinitely regressive—when having a good career means going to a good college, which requires acing your way through a top high school, middle school and even preschool—the onus is on the parent to push, push, push. We want our children to get …

Read this article if you’re having a rough day. This is a rare story about positive social change. Every state now has laws against school bullying. In the past decade, many districts have overhauled discipline policies and created interventions to increase mutual respect at school. Pop culture and the news media have focused on the harm that is done when …

About seven years ago, I started learning how to paint as a hobby. I was pretty terrible. Everything looked flat, I did not have the right proportions, and my colors were totally off. My friends and colleagues suggested that I stop wasting my time on something I wasn’t good at. “Focus on your day job,” they said. I kept at …

Nagging your kids to stick to a set bedtime each night may feel like a thankless task. But here’s some justification that your efforts are setting your kids up for a healthier life: A new study finds that preschool-age children who didn’t have a set sleep routine were more likely to be overweight by the time they became tweens. “We …

It’s difficult to have a teenager’s mind. The brain develops rapidly during the adolescent years, which partially explains why teens experience anger, sadness and frustration so intensely. During these tumultuous years, hormones surge, bodies change and adolescents must face a number of social and academic challenges, such as managing their relationships, coping with peer rejection and,— especially this time of …

When I was 4 years old, my parents faced a decision. My birthday is in late November, so should they send me to kindergarten as the youngest kid in my class? Or, wait another year to enroll me? — A practice referred to as academic redshirting. Since I was already the oldest sibling, they decided it was time for me …

The first time I got pregnant, I was a comparatively young mother, for my demographic: I was 25, in medical school, surrounded by classmates who, for the most part, were not reproducing yet. By the third pregnancy, 11 years later, I was over 35, which classified me, in the obstetric terminology I had learned in medical school, as an “elderly …

Childhood Exposure To Lead Can Blunt IQ For Decades, Study Suggests. Exposure to lead as a child can affect an adult decades later, according to a study out Tuesday that suggests a link between early childhood lead exposure and a dip in a person’s later cognitive ability and socioeconomic status. Lead in the United States can come from lots of …

For Jernica Quiñones, the reality of sudden infant death syndrome, or SIDS, hit close to home this year when a friend woke up on New Year’s Day and discovered the lifeless body of her baby girl. That’s why Quiñones’ 4-month-old son, Bless’n, has spent a lot of his life so far sleeping in a cardboard box. The 33-year-old mother of …

We stand in the bedroom together, side by side, clothes and toys piled up around us and empty boxes tossed into the hallway. “So, tell me,” I say. “What do you want to keep on the walls, and what should come down?” The colorful train decal on the wall of this bedroom looks babyish now compared to the basketball posters …

Parents and policy makers have become obsessed with getting young children to learn more, faster. But the picture of early learning that drives them is exactly the opposite of the one that emerges from developmental science. In the last 30 years, the United States has completed its transformation to an information economy. Knowledge is as important in the 21st century …

When a parent asks their child plenty of “who?”, “what?”, “when?”, “where?”, “why?” questions, encourages them to go into detail and includes open-ended questions, psychologists call this an elaborative style. Past research has shown that children with parents like this tend to remember more experiences from their lives (the opposite parental style is to ask fewer questions in general, and …

If you’re in need of some renewed faith in human nature, the research literature on altruism by toddlers is a great place to look. Charming studies have shown that little children will readily go out of their way to help you, such as picking up things you’ve dropped, or passing you stuff you can’t reach. They can even do “paternalistic …

It’s tough to be a teenager. Hormones kick in, peer pressures escalate and academic expectations loom large. Kids become more aware of their environment in the teen years — down the block and online. The whole mix of changes can increase stress, anxiety and the risk of depression among all teens, research has long shown. But a recent study published …

Building thankfulness and appreciation into the fabric of your family is a gift your kids can rely on when they are faced with disappointment. Painful thoughts and emotions sometimes show up when children and teens practice appreciation and children can easily misinterpret parents’ reminders to be thankful as an indication that we’re minimizing their challenges, even when that’s not the …

According to research, rather than antidepressants, there’s another option in dealing with postpartum depression: Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy. Imagine being pregnant. Now imagine you are at one of your routine OB appointments, legs in stirrups, when the OB asks if you have any experience with mindfulness practices. She’s already told you about the importance of nutrition and exercise, rest and self-care. …

Excessive use of computer games among young people in China appears to be taking an alarming turn and may have particular relevance for American parents whose children spend many hours a day focused on electronic screens. The documentary “Web Junkie,” to be shown next Monday on PBS, highlights the tragic effects on teenagers who become hooked on video games, playing …