Tuesday, August 29, 2006

Parenting chronicles


Just a bunch of quick links:

From the BPS Research Digest:

Toddlers read to daily by their mothers from an early age have bigger vocabularies and superior cognitive skills.

Jane E. Brody in the NYTimes:

Refusal to go to school is not an uncommon problem; up to one-quarter of children do it at some point. While you might expect the problem to be severest when a child first enters school, it occurs most often and hits hardest at ages 10 to 13.

Malcolm Gladwell on the loony idea called "zero tolerance" (this is not quite on parenting, but still ...):

Schools, historically, have been home to this kind of discretionary justice. You let the principal or the teacher decide what to do about cheating because you know that every case of cheating is different—and, more to the point, that every cheater is different. Jimmy is incorrigible, and needs the shock of expulsion. But Bobby just needs a talking to, because he’s a decent kid, and Mary and Jane cheated because the teacher foolishly stepped out of the classroom in the middle of the test, and the temptation was simply too much.

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