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]

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.