NewsTrust - Early Childhood - Most Recent Stories: Opinion (Mainstream)

Stop Panicking About Bullies

Sat, 31 Mar 2012 00:00:00 -0700

Wall Street Journal - By Nick Gillespie, Wall Street Journal - Mar. 31 (Opinion) - Childhood is safer than ever before, but today's parents need to worry about something. Nick Gillespie on why busybodies and bureaucrats have zeroed in on bullying.

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Santorum living in stone-age

Tue, 14 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0800

CNN - By Stephanie Coontz - Feb. 14 (Opinion) - Presidential candidate Rick Santorum is unhappy with last week's compromise over whether Catholic institutions should be required to cover contraception for their employees, arguing that birth control "shouldn't be covered by insurance at all."

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Why Fire Teachers?

Tue, 08 Mar 2011 00:00:00 -0800

Atlantic Monthly - By Megan McArdle - Mar. 08 (Opinion) - I think there are some jobs that are too important to let any consideration intrude other than the best way to get the job done. Nuclear power plants, firefighters, poison control--I don't want to let other social goals, no matter how laudable, hamper their mission. Teaching is one of those jobs.

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The New Normal

Tue, 01 Mar 2011 00:00:00 -0800

New York Times - By David Brooks - Mar. 01 (Opinion) - Since we have to cut the deficit, we might as well learn to do it wisely. Starting with education.

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In Defense of the Western Mom

Sat, 15 Jan 2011 00:00:00 -0800

Wall Street Journal - By Ayelet Waldman - Jan. 15 (Opinion) - Here are some of the things that my four children of a Jewish mother were always allowed to do: • Quit the piano and the violin, especially if their defeatist attitude coincided with a recital, thus saving me from the torture of listening to other people's precious children soldier through hackneyed pieces of the juvenile repertoire, plink after ever more unbearable plonk. • Sleep over at their friends' houses, especially on New Year's Eve or our anniversary, thus saving us the cost of a babysitter. • Play on the computer and surf the Internet, so long as they paid for their Neopet Usuki dolls and World of Warcraft abomination cleavers out of their own allowances. • Participate in any extracurricular activity they wanted, so long as I was never required to drive farther than 10 minutes to get them there, or to sit on a field in a folding chair in anything but the balmiest weather for any longer than 60 minutes. • Quit said extracurricular activities, especially if their quitting coincided with league finals that might have demanded participation on my part exceeding the requirements stated above. In the days since this newspaper published Amy Chua's simultaneously entertaining and infuriating excerpt from her new book, "Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother," my two elder children, 16 and 13, have devoted a remarkable amount of time to raging against the essay and crafting compelling and bombastic rebuttals to be delivered to Ms. Chua herself, should they ever encounter her.

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Closing The Achievement Gap With Baby Talk

Mon, 10 Jan 2011 00:00:00 -0800

NPR - Jan. 10 - A child growing up in a poor home hears fewer words per hour on average than a child in a higher-income household, research has shown. So around the country, programs are trying to reduce the achievement gap by getting parents to talk more to their kids.

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Are Same-Sex Couples Better Parents?

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0800

New York Times - By Lisa Belkin - Nov. 12 (Opinion) - Are the parenting styles of these couples and the psychological development of their children different from families led by heterosexual couples? There is an increasing body of data about this, too, compiled and analyzed in a new book by Abbie Goldberg, an assistant professor of psychology at Clark University in Worcester, Mass. In an essay in the magazine this weekend, I explore that question and conclude that in some ways same-sex parents have a lot to teach the rest of us.

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Even Babies Discriminate: A NurtureShock Excerpt

Mon, 14 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Newsweek - By Po Bronson, Ashley Merryman - Sep. 14 (Review) - Vittrup sent a third of the families home with multiculturally themed videos for a week, such as an episode of Sesame Street in which characters visit an African-American family's home, and an episode of Little Bill, where the entire neighborhood comes together to clean the local park.

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Earlier Puberty in European Girls

Mon, 04 May 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New York Times - By Tara Parker-Pope - May. 04 (Opinion) - A 15-year study of young girls in Denmark found that the average age of breast development has fallen by a full year compared to girls studied in the early 1990s. The findings, published this month in the journal Pediatrics, add to a growing body of evidence that the timing of puberty is changing, possibly related to environmental exposure to endocrine-disrupting chemicals that mimic estrogen in the body.

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Op-Ed Contributors - Head Start Falls Further Behind - NYTimes.com

Sun, 08 Feb 2009 00:00:00 -0800

New York Times - By Douglas J. Besharov, Douglas M. Call - Feb. 08 (Opinion) - BARACK OBAMA ran for president promising change. Unfortunately, a look inside the stimulus package reveals that “change” mostly means spending vastly more on domestic programs without necessarily improving the way they operate. Nowhere is this clearer than in its provisions concerning education, particularly Head Start. America’s most vexing educational problem is the achievement gap that puts low-income, mostly minority children far behind their peers on a host of important social and cognitive measures. The achievement gap stems from many sources, including historical discrimination, the abysmal condition of many schools serving low-income children and the child-rearing styles of many poor families.

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Early Childhood iPhone App Says "I See Ewe"

Tue, 03 Feb 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Wired - By Daniel Donahoo - Feb. 03 (Review) - I think I See Ewe works because it is grounded in early childhood education. The voice over could be heard in any early childhood education setting and the images are bright and simple. The children are given direction and their successes are re-enforced. As anyone with a young child will know, their capacity to quickly understand the touchscreen interface is a testament to human adaptability.

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Octuplets mom wants $2 million for story. And a TV show? | The Dish Rag

Tue, 03 Feb 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Los Angeles Times - By elizabeth Snead - Feb. 03 (Editorial) - The mother of 14 kids is asking for $2 million for her octuplets story. Oh, and she would also like a TV career as a child-care expert. Wow. How about scam artist instead? The divorced working mom lives in her parents' three-bedroom house in Whittier, Calif.

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Click and Jane

Sun, 01 Feb 2009 00:00:00 -0800

New York Times - By Virginia Heffernan - Feb. 01 (Comment) - “Did you like this book?” asks the computer. It’s a customer-satisfaction question, but it seems more profound than that. We hesitate. Ben, my 3-year-old son, shoots me a puzzled look. The answer should be yes. Ben enjoys what’s on the screen right now: Starfall, an online medley of free learn-to-read activities. But he doesn’t like the question. “It’s not a book,” he explains, emphatically, to the laptop. “It’s more like a movie or a video.” Oh, God. I knew it.

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Duncan details $150 billion education stimulus

Fri, 30 Jan 2009 00:00:00 -0800

CNN - By Campbell Brown, Arne Duncan - Jan. 30 (Interview) - CB: Mr. Secretary, the President's new stimulus plan includes a massive $150 billion increase in federal money for education. Walk us through what the priorities are and when parents can expect to see results. DUNCAN: This is an extraordinary opportunity and if we want to become a strong economy again, the best thing we can do is have an educated work force. So this is a huge, huge opportunity to make things dramatically better for schools and for school children around the country and at the higher Ed level as well. So the stimulus package is going to do a number of things. It's going to help us a tremendous unmet capital needs and so it's really going to be a huge opportunity to invest in infrastructure and several ready projects that we want to get to work on very early on, late spring and through the summer. We want to save literally hundreds of thousands of teaching jobs. We're very, very worried about tremendous cuts, devastating cuts in school districts and states around the country. We want to stay those off going into the fall. We want to continue to raise the bar academically, raise standards, raise expectations, and there's opportunities in the stimulus package to do that.

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