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Girls outperform boys in reading by more than 40 percent of a grade level in every US state, and the gap starts as early as kindergarten. Boys repeat kindergarten at nearly one and a half times the rate of girls, and boys make up roughly two-thirds of special education students nationwide. Researchers point to a […]

A new Rutgers/NIEER study finds regular parent-child reading dropped from 85% of preschoolers in 2019 to under 75% now, and it has not recovered in the years after the pandemic began. Researchers say the drop is significant: shared reading builds language, early literacy, and social-emotional skills in ways screen time and structured classes do not

Colerinsec, SHEIN and Melissa & Doug all recalled children’s toys in September 2026 for choking and magnet ingestion hazards, adding to a wave of small parts and magnet recalls this year. Two children were hospitalized after swallowing magnets from a single recalled toy line, and doctors say more than half of children who swallow high-powered

Thirty-one states now limit or ban personal devices in school for the 2025-26 or 2026-27 school year, and most of those bans lump smartwatches in with phones. Plenty of parents haven’t gotten the memo yet, and the gap between what a family assumes and what the school actually enforces is about to matter a lot

Researchers expect the gains from an early childhood program to fade once the program stops. A new study out of Rice University found the opposite: months after a nine-month parenting program ended, the participating kids had pulled further ahead of their peers, not fallen back. Children who took part were 6.5 months ahead of a

A baby in a wheeled walker can cross a room, and reach the top of a staircase, in under a second. That single fact sits behind a fresh recall this month and behind a fight pediatricians have been waging for more than twenty years to get these products off store shelves entirely. Most parents who

Say the same three words at 7am, 11am, 4pm, and 7pm, and listen to how differently they come out each time. That is the entire premise of a TikTok that has racked up nearly five million views this week, and it has parents across the country nodding along instead of laughing at a stranger’s video.

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

On July 5, a two year old in Hallandale Beach, Florida, became at least the tenth child to die in a hot car in the United States this year. Four of those deaths have come in a single stretch of weeks as summer heat settled in. For the safety group Kids and Car Safety, which

You flipped on the parental controls. You set the account to private, turned on the screen time reminders, and trusted the “teen safety” settings the app promised. New research from Northeastern University suggests a lot of that effort does far less than parents assume. When researchers set out to test 86 child safety features across

Jillian Orr went to a Nashville playground with her three boys and came home with a viral video. The 35-year-old preschool teacher had spent the outing juggling a Capri Sun, crackers, and diapers while watching two moms nearby split the parenting work without a word: one pushed the baby on the swings and handed out