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Top 5 reading list for parents 3/27-4/3

We listened to this edition of On Point earlier this week about screen time for babies 2 and under. Our takeaway? Don't torture yourself with singing and dancing crayons in the name of early educat...

Breakfast tips for real-life weekday mornings

You’ve heard it a million times: breakfast is the most important meal of the day. You probably also have heard of studies suggesting that kids who eat breakfast will be more focused, do better in ...

5 TED Talks that will help you understand learning

The research is clear. Children learn best in environments that value relationships, curiosity, creativity, making mistakes, reflection, and personalized learning. Every parent should see these fiv...

Laughing With Your Kids Is One of the Best Things You Can Do for Them

A sense of humor takes years to develop. Babies burble and laugh at peekaboo, toddlers love pratfalls, and potty humor is the pinnacle of wit through elementary school. Understanding different type...

Making time for kids? Study says quality trumps quantity. - The Washington Post

“I could literally show you 20 charts, and 19 of them would show no relationship between the amount of parents’ time and children’s outcomes. .?.?. Nada. Zippo,” said Melissa Milkie, a sociologist ...

Why Kids Need to Move, Touch and Experience to Learn | MindShift

When students use their bodies in the learning process, it can have a big effect, even if it seems silly or unconnected to the learning goal at hand. Researchers have found that when students use ...

Take an Internet Field Trip: 5 Links to Share with Your Kids

Share awesome, fun links with your kids on an Internet Field Trip curated for Parent Co. by Today Box. Today Box curates fun and educational daily facts, videos, photos, and jokes for curious kids ...

50 observations from a month of paternity leave

Brennan Carney is a teacher and Head Varsity Football Coach at Burlington High School. He and his wife Keri (also a teacher and coach) had their first son, Cooper on 12/29/2012. During his paternit...

weeSpring founder Allyson Downey: There's no such thing as an expert when it comes to your family

Allyson Downey is the founder, along with her husband, Jack, and friend Melissa Post, of weeSpring, a social media site designed to help new and soon-to-be parents navigate the overwhelming world o...

Top 5 reading list for parents 3/20-3/27

There are only so many hours in the day. Here are 5 things you might have missed. This weekend, I shall invest in a set of dry erase markers and re-write the programming at my house, using the exac...

Hey Kids! Go Outside, Already via On Point with Tom Ashbrook

American kids today spend only four to seven minutes a day playing outdoors. There are all kinds of reasons, but at heart it’s a lifestyle change. Listen here: Hey Kids! Go Outside, Already | On P...

Gender in Play: How Toca Boca Creates Apps for All Kids | A new way to play | Toca Boca

Some of the Toca Boca apps were among the first things I downloaded on my iPhone for my kids. From the beginning I was in love with their visual appeal and the lack of risky (and tacky) in app purc...

Parents are unconsciously setting their kids up to be materialists with fragile egos via Quartz

On Quartz, Sonali Kohli reports that taking things away from kids when they do something bad led them to be more insecure as adults, and that insecurity made them associate material things with suc...

Ad-Rock, "Older family man" via Daily Beast

Daily Beast: You play a domesticated dad in While We’re Young, and you’re an older family man now. Was it tough for you to transition into that mode? You were pretty wild back in the day. Ad-Rock:...

When the Computer Takes Over for the Teacher via The Atlantic

Don't think of teachers being replaced by technology in the classroom in 20 years - try five or 10. Joshua Starr, a nationally prominent superintendent, recently told NPR, "I ask teachers all the ...

Every parent should see these 5 TED Talks on education

Why are we still running schools the same way we did fifty years ago? This is the question students, teachers, parents, and researchers now wrestle with in the 21st century. According to the U.S. ...

Study: 60 Minutes of Homework is the Perfect Amount (via Big Think)

Melissa Dahl from NYMag reports that new research published in the Journal of Educational Psychology has found that any amount of homework that surpasses 70 minutes is too much. ...Those who repor...

8 of the Most Important Lessons Nature Teaches Kids (and Adults)

We welcome this guest post from Krissy Pozatek, LCSW, author, therapist and parent coach. After a decade as a wilderness therapist, Krissy identified concepts and skills kids gain in the wildernes...

Playlist for Kids and Parents: Letter Sending Songs!

Once you have kids, there's no reason to instantly sully your music collection with the song stylings of chubby purple dinosaurs and endless loops. Save your brain cells and expand theirs with musi...

Comic book month is coming!

Along with our normal content, next month Parent Co. is publishing a special series dedicated to comic books for kids. When we say comics, we're talking about the combination of illustration and t...

Author and sociologist Dalton Conley: You can't recreate the feral childhood

Dalton Conley is a professor and sociologist at New York University and author of several books, including his most recent, “Parentology: Everything You Wanted to Know About the Science of Raising ...

Stories of Family Adventure via VW Westfalia

Inspired by our illustrated VW Van contest, we're profiling some of the adventurous families that explore the world via VW van. In this post, Malissa shares her family's experiences, along with th...

How to respond to a rude child (even one that's not yours)

Question: I have a nine-year-old who is so rude to people when they come over that they are completely taken aback. I, of course am embarrassed and angry that after 9 years this child still refuses...