parenting

As parents have long observed, children learn with ease, rapidly absorbing information in their environment and picking up new skills and knowledge at a rapid pace. Things are not so easy for most adults — in particular, they have more difficulty learning languages — but they can be masterful at relying on hard-won experience to get them through life’s challenges.

U.S. inner-city schools often receive the lion’s share of attention from education reformers and charter school founders, but rural schools educate up to a third of America’s public school students and face challenges just as daunting as their urban counterparts.

Changes in family structure and attitudes toward family have obviously taken place in the past few decades across the West. Family-related data are often assessed at the national level, but how do similar countries compare with one another?

Jean Piaget, a pioneer of 20th-century cognitive development theory, claimed that preschoolers were “irrational, illogical … and limited to the here and now.” But nearly 100 years later, new technologies and approaches have provided cognitive scientists new ways to investigate how infants and young children learn; their findings challenge Piaget’s longstanding theories of early childhood cognitive development.

According to the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission, nine million cribs have been recalled since September 2007 because of safety issues. While many studies have been conducted on the rate of infant mortalities which occurred in cribs, playpens and bassinets, until recently little was known about the non-fatal injuries.

In 2002 the Institute of Medicine estimated that 4.3% of men with a child under 18 years old had suffered a paternity-related depressive disorder, while other studies have placed the probability of such depression within the first year of a child’s life as high as 10.4%.