A study in the journal Child Development shows that our intuition about positive reinforcement can be exactly wrong: Rewarding a child’s sharing resulted in the child choosing to share less.
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In elementary school the kids in the “redbird” and “bluebird” reading groups tended to be grouped together for math too. Why is that? Why do math and reading ability go hand-in-hand? And why do some kids break this mold to excel in only one?
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How does a child’s sense of fairness develop? A fascinating MIT study shows fairness depends on number sense and not necessarily age or socialization.
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What caught my ear wasn’t the fact that a young, hipsterish guy struggled with subtraction Captchas; it was the fact that he excused it, saying, “Hey, I’m not a numbers person…”
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Younger kids, without the bludgeon of logic, may be better able to open their minds to intuition.
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Massive data mining and Yale creativity research converge on a thin-slice test for creativity — and a powerful way to boost it.
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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.
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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.
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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).
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Researcher: “Cultivation of the basic personality features of openness to experience in children and adolescents may increase an individual’s trait creativity and, thereby, facilitate divergent thinking and creative achievement.”
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When excluded from a game, 12.6% of kids were directly assertive, insisting to be included. But 42.5% passively withdrew. But it wasn’t simply shy kids that pulled away. The difference was largely something called “cognitive conflict” as measured by a hairnet of electrodes.
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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?
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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.
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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.
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A new study in the journal Child Development shows that after kindergarten, the learning trajectories of the best readers tend to flatten and the trajectories of the worst readers tend to climb. Blame genetics? Blame school? You be the judge, but in either case, parenting practices play second fiddle.
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Contrary to popular misconception, kids start as skeptics, then parents and culture trick kids into belief, and then canny kids find disbelief. But what of the kids who continue to believe in dragons into the middle grades? Are these fantasy kids slow? Are they dumb? Studies suggest the opposite: it takes a nimble mind to buffer belief from the whisperings of reality and the evidence of doubters.
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