Author: Garth Sundem

I was at the park the other day throwing pine cones at my kids when a horrified mother asked, “How can you hit your kids with pine cones!” I said it was pretty easy: you just don’t lead them as much.

The quality of the explanations you offer to your children will influence their perception of your credibility. Not only that, but your explanations will influence how likely your kids are to ask you for explanations in the future.

In this age of Candy Crush and YouTube fail compilations, science shows how to encourage a 7-year-old to stick with his violin teacher’s insistence on months spent perfecting the perfect hand and bow position (and other boring things).

A study on early view at the journal Child Development asks an interesting question: who cares about popularity? Really what the study asks is who most cares about popular people? Sure, everyone gives popular kids more attention, but who is most likely to give the most attention?

Remember the Tower of Hanoi — that game with discs and pegs? Well it requires planning, specifically the ability to see that you have to move away from your goal so that you can eventually move toward it. A study in the journal Child Development shows that kids’ Tower of Hanoi ability is a better predictor of math and reading success than socioeconomic status or anything else. And that training this important skill of planning may help disadvantaged kids catch up.

The number of words a child knows when he or she enters kindergarten is an astoundingly good predictor of how well they’ll do in school and even how they will much later do in the workplace. A study from the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Chicago published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences shows that it’s quality and not quantity of speech that teaches vocabulary. If your speech matches your actions and the surrounding context, kids learn your words — if not, it’s just talk.