Month: March 2023

Excerpted from “Generation Sleepless” (Penguin, 2022) by Heather Turgeon and Julie Wright.
Little kids and teenagers model their behaviors (often subconsciously) after their parents, so if your phone is an appendage and your attention is continually drawn to it, this behavior pattern is more likely to be adopted by your kids. When you practice basic boundaries and good screen habits, this also rubs off on the whole family. Not only that, it signifies to your teen that your own sleep and well-being are a priority.
Parents have room for improvement in this arena: the majority of parents say they sleep with a mobile device next to their bed, and about 1 in 4 say they wake up to check their phone in the night. If you ask children about their parents’ screen behaviors, many will express disdain for the phone and say their mom or dad is always on it, and it’s hard to get their attention. Half of adolescents say their parent or caregiver is distracted by their cell phone when they’re trying..

This story was originally published by Parenting Translator. Sign up for the newsletter and follow Parenting Translator on Instagram. An audio version of this post can be heard here.
“Ms. Rachel” has become a household name for nearly every parent with a baby or toddler. Her YouTube channel, Songs for Littles – Toddler Learning Videos, has over 3 million subscribers and her videos have hundreds of millions of views. The woman behind Ms. Rachel is Rachel Griffin Accurso, a preschool teacher and mother living in New York City. Her husband is a Broadway composer who helps to produce her YouTube channel. As she explained in a recent interview on the Today show, she started the YouTube channel because her son did not speak his first word until nearly 3 years old and she could not find a television show that targeted language development to help him.
Her YouTube channel description claims that her videos “help children learn to talk, learn letters, numbers, colors, animal sounds and more..

Education researchers have been urging schools to invest their $120 billion in federal pandemic recovery funds in tutoring. What researchers have in mind is an extremely intensive type of tutoring, often called “high dosage” tutoring, which takes place daily or almost every day. It has produced remarkable results for students in almost 100 studies, but these programs are difficult for schools to launch and operate.
They involve hiring and training tutors and coming up with tailored lesson plans for each child. Outside organizations can help provide tutors and lessons, but schools still need to overhaul schedules to make time for tutoring, find physical space where tutors can meet with students, and safely allow a stream of adults to flow in and out of school buildings all day long. Tutoring programs with research evidence behind them are also expensive, at least $1,000 per student. Some exceed $4,000.
One organization has designed a different tutoring model, which gives very short ..

Years ago, when I was still coaching high school cross country, a teenage girl skipped up to me after practice with a warning: Don’t count on her to race all the time. If her nerves got too intense before races, she might have to bow out in advance. “I have anxiety!” she explained with a nervous grin.
I recalled this episode while reading psychologist and author Lisa Damour’s refreshing new book, “The Emotional Lives of Teenagers: Raising Connected, Capable, and Compassionate Adolescents.” Damour’s voice is forceful but comforting, and she uses it here to drive home her central point: Achieving mental health does not mean a life without unhappiness, anguish, anger, worry or self-doubt. Rather, these painful emotional states are an unavoidable feature of being human, especially for young people buzzing with hormones and adjusting to operatic moods prompted by recent rewiring of their brains. To best help their developing teenagers, parents should work to build their self-esteem and th..