Jarrod Partridge

Kristin Diehl walked into Target on a Sunday in early July and stopped in her tracks: colored pencils, binders, and backpacks, stacked and ready, while school had barely been out a few weeks. She is not alone in her surprise. Target, Walmart, Amazon, and other big retailers rolled out back-to-school displays in June this year, […]

Excessive Heat Warnings now cover more than 160 million people across two-thirds of the country, and summer camps from Idaho to Ohio are moving kids indoors mid-session to keep them safe. Meteorologists expect more than 90 local temperature records to fall this week alone, as an unusually large and stubborn heat dome parks itself over

If your baby’s crib has a padded bumper, a bed rail, or a soft carrier bought in the past two years, it’s worth a five-minute check this week. The Consumer Product Safety Commission has flagged a fresh cluster of nursery products for suffocation, entrapment, and fall hazards, several of them sold through major retailers and

Six hundred teenagers were asked a blunt question for a new study: does your parent love their phone more than you? The answers, published this month in the journal Frontiers in Psychology, describe kids who feel dismissed mid-sentence, ignored at the dinner table, and left waiting while a parent finishes scrolling. Researchers now say that

A dad asks his almost-15-year-old son for one more hold, the way he used to when the boy was small enough to carry on one hip. The son says yes. The video amassed hundreds of thousands of views within days. Now parents across TikTok are doing the same thing with their own tweens and teens,

A single school board meeting in Kinnelon, New Jersey has turned into a national flashpoint. Families are threatening to leave the district. Parents on both sides are packing public comment sessions. And the fight isn’t really about Kinnelon at all. It’s about a question that districts across the country are being forced to answer this

An ordinary family photo, posted to a birthday album or a school website, can now be pulled by a stranger and turned into exploitative content in minutes using freely available AI tools. Child safety organizations say this shift has happened fast enough that most parents have no idea their family photos carry this new risk,

A toddler who tries to follow a parent into the bathroom. A 7-year-old who refuses to play in the next room alone. A middle schooler who still wants a parent within sight at a birthday party. Parents online have started calling this pattern the “velcro kid,” and the term has spread fast enough that psychologists

“Can you please put your shoes on?” sounds polite. It also isn’t a real question, and most kids know it. A child development specialist who has worked with more than 5,000 families says that gap, between what a parent asks and what a parent actually means, is behind more bedtime standoffs and morning meltdowns than

Researchers tracked children’s phones minute by minute instead of asking them to remember their own screen time, and the real numbers landed harder than any survey ever could. Kids in the study watched an average of 708 TikTok videos a day. Half of those videos lasted five seconds or less. Three in four children logged