Child Development News

Here’s how exploration and curiosity can build lessons in preschool: https://edut.to/4e98tMf

A leading pediatricians groups believes recess isn’t just a fun break for grade schoolers, but crucial to good health and good grades for kids of all ages.

🛝 Read more: https://bit.ly/4nz7Fon

Princess of Wales' Italy visit highlights progressive preschool approach that shuns standardization The Princess of Wales’ visit to Italy highlights the Reggio Approach, an educational model that values a child’s curiosity and potential.

https://phys.org/news/2025-07-large-scale-mounting-case-notion.html Large-scale study adds to mounting case against notion that boys are born better at math

Large-scale study adds to mounting case against notion that boys are born better at math Twenty years ago, cognitive psychologist Elizabeth Spelke took a strong position in an ongoing public debate. "There are no differences in overall intrinsic aptitude for science and mathematics among women and men," the researcher declared. A new paper in the journal Nature, written by Spelke and a....

Problem Solvers: A Free Early STEM Curriculum

https://doi-org.libezp.lib.lsu.edu/10.1080/00094056.2024.2425269

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Unsettled science on longer-run effects of early education More rigorous research is needed on how to design programs

Care ethics just might transform the way people think about what they owe their children, Elissa Strauss writes.

https://theatln.tc/FjQoH89J

“Care is as much practical work as it is psychological, ethical, and spiritual,” Strauss writes. Yet parenting seems to be missing in a substantial way from the sources—religion, classic novels, economics—many people use to understand their place in the world. In searching for “a body of thought that treated parenting as worthy of serious inquiry and established care as central to our moral concerns,” Strauss found her way to a branch of philosophy known as care ethics.

“Care ethicists spend their days contemplating subjects such as the essence of what it means to care well for another, and how this care intersects with people’s capacity to be ‘good’ or to live what they might call ‘the good life,’” Strauss writes. “Thinkers have instead been preoccupied with defining right or wrong based on interactions between independents, two people who are essentially equals. But humans spend much of their lives in dependency relationships: We start as children dependent on parents, become adults who care for our children, move on to caring for our parents or other adults, and later become older and require care again.”

American society is not yet structured to reflect the ubiquity of dependency. “When a country truly supports parents and caregivers … it doesn’t just offer people relief in the form of rest and financial resources,” Strauss writes. “It also increases and embraces the possibility that people might grow from the experience of caring for others—that they might see care, the giving and receiving of it, as an indispensable part of living ‘the good life.’”
“Our culture tends to see parents as the fixed factor and children as the variable factor. Children get to grow, while parents are expected to be a steady, stabilizing force,” Strauss continues. “Care ethics helped me see myself as a variable factor as well. As a result, I feel not only liberated from a checklist approach to parenthood but also more able to see the challenges of parenting as a fulfilling intellectual and emotional exercise.”

https://theatln.tc/FjQoH89J

📸: Daniel Hundven-Clements / Gallery Stock

"School was not easy for me."

Carol Greider achieved success in molecular biology in the same way she overcame dyslexia as a child: with persistence and creativity.

Since she found it hard to read the traditional way, she found another: she taught herself to memorise words and letter order, circumventing her inability to sound out words. Carol Greider is one of many Nobel Prize laureates that have dyslexia.

How to be a Play-Based "Teacher" I never pretend to know what kids will learn on any given day and, honestly, any teacher who does is either deluded or blowi...