Parenting Is a Political Choice (Whether We Admit It or Not)
Many parents resist the idea that parenting is political. That framing is comforting. It’s also incomplete, because children do not grow up in a neutral space.
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Developmental Leaps: What’s Real, What’s an App, and What to Do With a Kid Who Fell Apart This Week
All four of my kids had developmental leaps you could set a clock by, and I’d still tell you to be careful with the word. I knew what I was looking for, which is most of why I saw them. A kid who’d been sleeping would stop. A kid who’d been easy would be glued…
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Mixed-Age Play: The Thing School Took Away Without Telling You
There is a six-year gap between my oldest and my youngest, and the best play that happens in my house happens across it. Not the tidiest play. The best. The five-year-old gets pulled into games she would never have invented and rises to them; the eleven-year-old slows down, explains, improvises rules that let a small…
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Big Kids Need Play Too: Nobody Decided Play Ends at Ten, It Just Got Replaced
Walk into a high school lunchroom at 11:40 on a Tuesday and it is quieter than a library. I did it for eleven years. Three hundred teenagers, shoulder to shoulder at long tables, and almost nobody talking, because almost everybody was looking down. The room that in every movie about high school is the loud…
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TV Shows for 9-to-12-Year-Olds That Won’t Wind Them Up: A Slow List, With Ages
Most lists of shows for nine-to-twelve-year-olds are sorted by whether the content is appropriate. Almost none of them are sorted by the thing that actually matters at that age, which is pace. A show can have no violence, no language and a lovely message and still leave a ten-year-old jangly, short-tempered and unable to settle…
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Slow Parenting: What It Actually Is, and Why It Isn’t a Style
Slow parenting is not a style, and the first thing to do with the phrase is stop treating it like one. A style is something you pick. Slow parenting is closer to a correction: you look at your family’s week, notice that nobody in the house chose it, and start taking things out until the…
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Growth Mindset for Kids: The Poster Version Is Wrong, and the Real Version Is Free
Every classroom I taught in had the poster. “Mistakes help me grow.” “I can’t do it YET.” And every classroom I taught in was full of sixteen-year-olds who treated a wrong answer as a small catastrophe, which should tell you something about the poster. Growth mindset is one of the few ideas from psychology that…
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Problem-Solving Skills for Kids: You Can’t Teach Them. You Can Only Stop Preventing Them.
The reason your kid can’t solve a problem on her own is that somebody has always solved it first, and I say that with love, because for eleven years the somebody was me. I taught high school English, and I can tell you exactly what happened every time I gave an assignment with no rubric…
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When Should a Kid Get a Tablet?
Later than the store thinks, later than the other parents at preschool think, and probably later than you’re hoping I’ll say. The specific version by age is next, because you searched for it and you deserve a straight number. The number is still the least important thing in this essay. The reason is what you…
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Why Babies Throw Things on the Floor (and Why Knowing Changes Everything)
Every one of my four went through the high-chair phase where dinner became a physics experiment. Spoon over the side. Watch it land. Look at me. Cup over the side. Watch it land. Look at me. Peas, one at a time, each with the same small tilt of the head, as if the floor might…
