Sleep
How Sleep Affects Memory in Children
The relationship between sleep and memory is one of the best-established findings in cognitive neuroscience — and it extends to infants and toddlers i...
2 min read
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Showing articles tagged with: #learning
20 articles found
Sleep
Why Sleep Matters for Brain Development in Young Children
Sleep is the part of the day where it looks like nothing is happening. In a young child's brain, that is exactly when the most consequential work is h...
4 min read
Play
Why Play Is the Primary Way Young Children Learn
The idea that play and learning are separate — that children play when they are not learning, and learn when they are not playing — is one of the most...
2 min read
Play
Why Repetition in Play Is Important for Development
A 2-year-old who has filled and emptied the same bowl 47 times in 20 minutes is not bored or unimaginative — they are doing exactly the cognitive work...
6 min read
Play
How to Create Educational Toys at Home
The word "educational" is one of the most abused in the toy industry. Many products marketed as educational provide minimal developmental value beyond...
2 min read
Play
Play and Learning in the Early Years: The Complete Parent's Guide
Adults treat play as the soft category — the thing you do after the real work. For young children it is the real work. The fastest brain growth happen...
8 min read
Parenting
How to Talk About Mistakes Without Shame
The clearest body of work on this distinction is June Tangney and Ronda Dearing's research at George Mason. They tracked children into adolescence and...
7 min read
Parenting
Why Pretend Play Is Doing More Than It Looks Like
Your toddler hands you a plastic banana and tells you it's a phone. A 3-year-old narrates an elaborate scene where the stuffed bear is sick and needs...
6 min read
Parenting
The Science of Positive Discipline
"Positive discipline" sounds like a marketing phrase, but it rests on roughly forty years of developmental neuroscience. The short version: young chil...
5 min read
Parenting
Natural Consequences vs. Punishment: What the Difference Actually Is
There's a meaningful difference between "this happened because of what you did" and "this is happening because I'm cross with you." Children pick up o...
5 min read
Parenting
How to Let Children Fail Safely
Every parent dreads seeing their child fail. Yet failure is one of the most powerful teachers your child will ever have. The key is understanding the...
5 min read
Parenting
How Confidence in Parenting Decisions Is Formed
New parents often ask themselves, "How will I know if I'm doing this right?" The answer is that confidence isn't something that magically appears. It'...
5 min read
Parenting
Books and Research on Parenting: Key Concepts
A handful of underlying ideas show up in nearly every parenting book worth reading. Authors have rebranded them, repackaged them, and added their own...
6 min read
Daycare
How Daycare Staff Support Toilet Training
Most American children master daytime toileting somewhere between 24 and 36 months, with the AAP noting that pushing children before signs of readines...
9 min read
Daycare
Outdoor Time and Nature at Daycare: Why It Matters
Time outdoors is one of the few things in early childhood that produces almost universal benefit — to physical development, sleep, mood, attention, an...
10 min read
Family Life
Cooking With Children: What's Realistic at Each Age
There's a reason children eat the cake they helped make even when they've turned their nose up at every other dessert that week. Helping prepare food...
8 min read
Family Life
Co-Viewing Media With Young Children: Making Screen Time Worth Something
Most under-fives spend some time in front of a screen. The interesting question isn't whether they watch — that ship has often sailed by the time they...
8 min read
Daycare
What Children Learn From Having Multiple Caregivers
The old worry that a child looked after by parents, grandparents, a childminder, and a key worker at nursery somehow ends up with a "watered-down" att...
8 min read
Daycare
Activities and Learning in Daycare: What Actually Matters
When parents visit daycare settings, they often focus on the activity programme — arts and crafts, music, physical education, themed weeks. While plan...
2 min read
Parenting
Homework Battles: Why They Happen and How to Defuse Them
The homework battle is recognisable in millions of households at 4pm: a tired child, a tired parent, a worksheet, and within ten minutes both people a...
9 min read