My Parent Reading List From The Past Few Months

-NYT: Modifying a Child’s Behavior Without Resorting to Bribes

offering short-term incentives to elicit behavior is unreliable, ineffective and causes “considerable long-term damage.”

-Wired: School Design May Affect a Child’s Grades

-WSJ: Family Inc. - A new generation of parents is taking solutions from the workplace and transferring them to the home. From accountability checklists to branding sessions, the result is a bold new blueprint for happy families. [describes applying agile development to the family model]

-Outside: The Explainer: Why Kids Shouldn't Be Focused on Just 1 Sport
[something I have always believed and drove me to participate in as many sports as possible. Also why I quit basketball prior to my senior year. Rule was you couldn't play in other sports so that would have meant I had to give up indoor soccer, badminton, and hockey.]

-NPR: How Parents Can Learn To Tame A Testy Teenager

"The key in all these disputes, says Abraham, is not to argue with your teen about being angry. Help them understand why they're angry. " 

-MariaMontessori.com: Seven Ways to Love a Child: A Valentine for Parents

-NPR: Selling Kids On Veggies When Rules Like 'Clean Your Plate' Fail

-Lifehacker: 10 Things I Wish I Had Known Before Becoming a Parent

"2. The First Few Months Are Pure Torture"  

-TheAtlantic: Why Parents Need to Let Their Children Fail

-TheAtlantic: Your Kid Probably Doesn't Need Antibiotics

-TheAtlantic: Study: Praise Children For What They Do, Not Who They Are [this is similar to an older classic story from NYMag and is why I have never told my kids they are smart, but very observant]

-NPR: Parents, Just Say No To Sharing Tales Of Drug Use With Kids

-NPR: Whole Milk Or Skim? Study Links Fattier Milk To Slimmer Kids

-On Point: The Secrets Of Happy Families "oscillating family narrative" -> grit

-SciAm: Can Training to Become Ambidextrous Improve Brain Function?

-Lifehacker: 10 Things to Stop Saying to Your Kids (and What to Say Instead)

-Wired: The Terrible Truth About Toddlers and Touchscreens

-NYT Bits: The Child, the Tablet and the Developing Mind

-NYT Opinionator: The Power of Talking to Your Baby

-Fast.CoExist: Family Dinners Benefit Teens, Despite What They Might Say

-NYT: When Helping Hurts

...a paper published in February in the American Sociological Review ...led by the sociologist Laura T. Hamilton of the University of California, Merced, finds that the more money parents spend on their child’s college education, the worse grades the child earns. A separate study, published the same month in the Journal of Child and Family Studies and led by the psychologist Holly H. Shiffrin at the University of Mary Washington, finds that the more parents are involved in schoolwork and selection of college majors — that is, the more helicopter parenting they do — the less satisfied college students feel with their lives.

-AtlanticCities: Doctors Now Advise Wearing Helmets During Tornado Warnings

-TheAtlantic: How to Raise a Kid: Thomas Jefferson vs. Abigail Adams Edition 

"Thomas Jefferson pushed his daughter to succeed, while Abigal Adams cautioned her son against failure. What's a better incentive?" 

-NPR: Parents' Saliva On Pacifiers Could Ward Off Baby's Allergies 

-FastCOCreate: 4 Ways To Be A Happier Parent--One Mother's Experiment 

-HuffPo: How to Talk to Little Girls [or not]

"That's why I force myself to talk to little girls as follows... "Hey, what are you reading?"

-PSMag: Accentuate the Positive—and See Your Kids Learn More

the authors do have a recommendation: reframe health warnings for kids away from tragic results and toward what good can come out of [it]

-TheAtlantic: Don't Write Off Cursive 

-TTBOOK: Precious Ink [audio; about handwriting]

-Smithsonian: It’s a Myth: There’s No Evidence That Coffee Stunts Kids’ Growth -> myth came from advertising.
[though as a counter-point I would argue that caffeine close to bed time could interfere with sleep patterns and less sleep could lead to a decrease in physical/mental development]

Reading List

Some things regarding parenting that I've read and other parents may find interesting.

-NYT: A Silicon Valley School That Doesn’t Compute

The chief technology officer of eBay sends his children to a nine-classroom school here. So do employees of Silicon Valley giants like Google, Apple, Yahoo and Hewlett-Packard.

But the school’s chief teaching tools are anything but high-tech: pens and paper, knitting needles and, occasionally, mud. Not a computer to be found. No screens at all. They are not allowed in the classroom, and the school even frowns on their use at home.

[related] -> GOOD: Why Are Silicon Valley Executives Sending Their Kids to a Tech-Free School?

-Pure Montessori (in Cape Town, SA): Why our Montessori Classrooms are Computer Free [.doc] -

-Wired: Exposure to Dogs Could Protect Kids From Asthma [hygiene hypothesis]

-Geekdad: 32-Year Study Shows How Geeky Kids Become Happy Adults [social engagement better predictor of well being as adults than academic achievement]

-FastCOExist: To Raise A Generation Of Creative Kids, Let Them Make Their Own Stories

-SciAm: Even A Few Years Of Music Training Benefits The Brain

There is a body of research that suggests music training not only improves hearing, it bolsters a suite of brain functions. Musically trained kids do better in school, with stronger reading skills, increased math abilities, and higher general intelligence scores. Music even seems to improve social development, as people believe music helps them be better team players and have higher self-esteem. “Based on what we already know about the ways that music helps shape the brain, the study suggests that short-term music lessons may enhance lifelong listening and learning,”

-Smithsonian: Why School Should Be More Like Summer Camp

-NPR: In Constant Digital Contact, We Feel 'Alone Together' On young children using digital devices
"Children are getting these phones earlier and earlier. These are years when children need to develop this capacity for solitude, this capacity to feel complete playing alone. If you don't have a capacity for solitude, you will always be lonely, and my concern is that the tethered child never really feels that sense that they are sort of OK unto themselves; and I talk to college students who've grown up with the habit of being in touch with their parents five, 10, 15 times a day. And it's no longer Huckleberry Finn as a model of adolescence, you know, sailing down the Mississippi alone — we've developed a model of adolescence and childhood where we sail down the Mississippi together with our families in tow." -

-NPR: Docs Say Choose Organic Food To Reduce Kids' Exposure To Pesticides
And that Stanford study you may have heard about that indicated no nutritional differences between organic and traditional food? It didn't really say what it was said to.

-Resilience.org: Resilience: Why so many parents today are getting it wrong

-NYT: The Competing Views on Competition

“One of the biggest culprits in psychology is wanting kids to feel good all the time,” Dr. Tauer said. “Trying to avoid competition is making it bigger than it needs to be.”

-TheAtlantic: The Evolutionary Importance of Grandmothers

-BUTWT: Do parents actually matter?

-NPR: Random Acts Of Kindness Can Make Kids More Popular

-NYT: Understanding How Children Develop Empathy

Don’t offer material rewards for prosocial behavior, but do offer opportunities to do good

-WSJ: At-Home Dads Make Parenting More of a 'Guy' Thing 

-BrainPickings: How to Raise a Child: 10 Rules from Susan Sontag

-OnPoint: Ken Jennings: Don’t Believe Your Parents

-NYMag: Why You Truly Never Leave High School: New science on its corrosive, traumatizing effects.

Some Recent Reads Other Parents May Be Interested In

-TheAtlantic: How to Enjoy the Often Exhausting, Depressing Role of Parenthood

-PhysOrg: Study: paid family leave leads to positive economic outcomes

-MedicalXPress: New study confirms that mom's love good for child's brain

School-age children whose mothers nurtured them early in life have brains with a larger hippocampus, a key structure important to learning, memory and response to stress.

-TheAtlantic: The Long-Term Effects of Spanking

Depression, aggression, anxiety, feelings of hopelessness, drug and alcohol use, and "general psychological maladjustment." were among the problems seen in children who were spanked. As children who have been spanked become adults, they are more likely to become aggressive themselves since they have seen adults solving problems aggressively. According to the authors, "...virtually without exception, these studies found that physical punishment was associated with higher levels of aggression against parents, siblings, peers, and spouses."

-Wired: Does Preschool Matter?

-IEEE Spectrum: Cell Phone Radiation Leads to Hyperactive Offspring in Mice

-TIME: Study: Could Cell-Phone Use in Pregnancy Affect Kids’ Behavior?

-EurekaAlert: Nearly half of preschool children not taken outside to play by parents on a daily basis

-TheAtlantic: Impatient Parents Tend to Bring Up Unruly Toddlers

"Parents' ability to regulate themselves and to remain firm, confident, and not overreact is a key way they can help their children to modify their behavior

-TheAtlantic: The Benefits of Breastfeeding

The risk of being hospitalized for a lower respiratory track infection (pneumonia, bronchitis) is reduced by 72 percent in infants who are breastfed exclusively for more than four months. The risk of ear infections is decreased by 50 percent in infants who breastfeed for more than three months, and by 63 percent in infants who breastfed exclusively for six months. Breastfeeding reduced the incidence of gastrointestinal infections by 64 percent, with the protection lasting for two months after breastfeeding is discontinued. Breastfeeding confers a 38 percent reduction in the risk of sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS) that is independent of the sleeping position of the infant. When infants are breastfed exclusively for three to four months, they have a 27 percent decrease in the development of asthma, atopic dermatitis, and eczema. This protection increases to 42 percent in infants with a positive family history for these allergic conditions. If infants are being breastfed at the time of their first exposure to gluten, there is a 52 percent reduction in the risk of developing celiac disease. There is a 31 percent reduction in the development of inflammatory bowel disease in breastfed children. When breastfeeding of any duration had occurred, there was a 15 to 30 percent decrease in adolescent and adult obesity; the longer the breastfeeding, the more the reduction in overweight. Infants who were exclusively breastfed for at least three months with no exposure to cows milk protein had up to a 30 percent decrease in type 1 diabetes and a reduction of 40 percent in the incidence of type 2 diabetes. A reduction of 20 percent in the risk of acute lymphocytic leukemia and 15 percent in the risk of acute myeloid leukemia has been seen in infants breastfed for six months or longer. 

-Outside: Breaking the Rules: Doing Right Means Sometimes Ignoring the Law
[teaching a moral life without dictating it. Freedom is about making the right choices]

-TheAtlantic: An Easy Trick That Helps Preschoolers Learn to Read: Point to the Words

-NatGeo: Teenage Brains

...risk-friendly weighing of cost versus reward has been selected for because, over the course of human evolution, the willingness to take risks during this period of life has granted an adaptive edge. Succeeding often requires moving out of the home and into less secure situations. "The more you seek novelty and take risks," says Baird, "the better you do." This responsiveness to reward thus works like the desire for new sensation: It gets you out of the house and into new turf.

Middle Childhood - When The Adult Brain Starts To Boot Up

via NYT: The Hormone Surge of Middle Childhood

In middle childhood, the brain is open for suggestions. What do I need to know? What do I want to know? Well, you could take up piano, chess or juggling, learn another language or how to ski.

Child Spacing

Via Freakonomics: Want Smarter Kids? Space Them (At Least) Two Years Apart

The hypothesis is the older kids get more of their parents time before the second sibling comes along. However, based on my observations I would hypothesize that the role the older child plays in teaching their younger sibling skills they already have (such as reading) is what leads to better test scores.

Minimalist Shoes For Kids

Run free kids.

The value of going shoe-free has been linked before.

NaturalRunningCenter.com has more on the topic in Get Your Kids Into Minimalist Shoes to Ensure Natural Foot Development because, as stated in the post "Kids’ shoes until recently have been marketed by the shoe companies to parents, educators, and health care professionals to prepare our kids for shoes they are marketing for adults to wear."

For a review on some minimalist shoes available from Golden Shoes in downtown TC see BRU: Merrell Barefoot Kids Review (Pace and Trail Glove)

More On The Importance Of Zero To Six

Via PsychToday: Getting Ahead: Why Preschool Benefits the Brain

Although preschool does not teach market economics or neuroscience, it provides necessary skills that are essential to getting—and keeping—a job later in life. Most important, children learn how to socialize with peers, manage stress and solve problems. At age 28, the adults who received preschool educations years before had significantly higher job prestige, earnings and socioeconomic status.

In addition to boosting the life-course prospects of the children who received preschool education, the program also saves society money. It costs around $8,000 to send a child to preschool for a half day during the school year, but the estimated benefits in terms of increased productivity and reduced cost to the criminal justice system put the savings at just over $80,000, a ten-fold return on investment.

Practicing Free Throws

I never did homework in high school but I did practice my free throws. Not that I was an excellent basketball player, I underachieved in academics and basketball, but I always liked the repetition of free throws.

However, it was only in graduate school when I learned to apply myself academically, and that was by thinking of complex math and chemistry formulas as shooting free throws.

I saw that doing these equations over and over was the only way to get better at them, and it definitely worked for me.

OvercomingBias mentions a study similar to what I found about math work: Only Do Math Homework

...we find that math homework has a large and statistically meaningful effect on math test scores throughout our sample. However, additional homework in science, English and history are shown to have little to no impact on their respective test scores.

2 Hours

If your kids have two hours of free time then spending those two hours outside can help prevent nearsightedness (NPR: Buried Indoors, Ranks Of Nearsighted Grow) or contribute to obesity if you put them in front of media (NPR: Pediatricians Recommend A Media Diet For Kids To Fight Obesity).

Parenting Advice From An Unlikely Source

Prison.

See MJ: What Parents Can Learn From Prison Guards

The article, "7 things never to say to anyone, and why", listed common statements used by prison guards and police officers and explained why they make people do the exact opposite of what they're being told to do. The seven things were:

1. "Hey you! Come here!"

2. "Calm down!"

3. "I'm not going to tell you again!"

4. "Be more reasonable!"

5. "Because those are the rules!"

6. "What's your problem?"

7. "What do you want me to do about it?"

Environmental Working Group Released Their Annual Best Sunscreens List

EWG: Best Beach & Sport Sunscreens

California Baby has four products make the list.

Cow Bell Won't Help

The best course for kids with a fever is to let it do its own thing - that's why we have the fever.

What I normally do is wait at least 24 hrs with the child having a fever then give them minimum doses of a fever reducer as needed simply to keep them comfortable. The exception was my oldest daughter who seemed to have asthma-like symptoms triggered by a high fever.

See NPR: Pediatricians Caution Parents Against 'Fever Phobia'

Speaking of body temperature, research indicates 98.6 is ideal for preventing fungal growth [SciAm].

Dirt - It Is Not Just For Boys

More hygiene hypothesis to explain why girls appear to be less healthy than boys. See NPR: Why Keeping Little Girls Squeaky Clean Could Make Them Sick

The converse of this topic was recently on the Diane Rehm Show: "Cinderella Ate My Daughter"

Crazy For You

The Freedom to Learn blog at Psych Today has this advice: How to Advise and Help Your Kids Without Driving Them (or Yourself) Crazy (see the linked article for the full list)

1. When your child asks for help or advice, give only what was asked for...
2. Before offering unsolicited help or advice count to ten...
3. Before trying to protect your child from danger, think of the potential benefits as well as the potential costs of the "dangerous" behavior...

Can Parents Affect Teenage Alcohol Abuse?

Yes.

See NPR: Parenting Style Plays Key Role In Teen Drinking

The parenting style that led to the lowest levels of problem drinking borrowed something from each of the extremes. From the strict parents: accountability and consequences for bad behavior. From the indulgent parents: warmth and support

Stimulation Does Not Equal Playing

The importance of open environments and investing in play capital at FastCoDesign: The Four Secrets of Playtime That Foster Creative Kids

More On The Importance Of Kindergarten Study

Covered previously in Where To Focus Your Resources

The research was recently in Harvard Magazine: Kindergarten Matters

[Via 3QD]

iPhone App For Paranoid Parents

Seems a little creepy to me though, on multiple levels, yet this has utility.

Via TheAtlantic: Finding Sex Offenders Using Your iPhone

From a technical standpoint this is a fascinating use of augmented reality technology.

Confirmation Of The Praise Paradox

If you are not familiar with the downside of too much praise for your child then stop what you're doing because I'm going to ruin what you used to know.

First read at NYMag: How Not to Talk to Your Kids: The inverse power of praise.

Via TheAtlantic comes confirmation from an extensive study: Be Wary of Calling Kids 'Gifted'

The Berenstain Bears Were Right

You have to teach kids to defend themselves against bullying.

The CSMonitor carries an opinion piece arguing that the way kids should deal with bullies is to teach them the art of the comeback.

See: Bullying: The advice you got is wrong. Here's what really works.

Perhaps my children's bedtime reading should be Oscar Wilde so they can learn the art of quipping.