Parents are told that writing by hand is vital for their child's growing brain, and that screens are eroding it. We sort the viral headlines from the solid evidence, and find the real benefit belongs to one group above all: children still learning their letters.
Your child's fussiness for food is mostly inherited, and most of the things parents try in order to fix it make it worse. Find out why young children refuse food, why it is rarely a parent's fault, and the unglamorous method that genuinely changes how they eat.
Most of what shapes a young life turns out to be joyful and ordinary. A major new study shows what teenagers themselves treasure, and why the way they answer can tell you how they are really doing.
Parents are told that writing by hand is vital for their child's growing brain, and that screens are eroding it. We sort the viral headlines from the solid evidence, and find the real benefit belongs to one group above all: children still learning their letters.
Parents are told that writing by hand is vital for healthy brain development, and that screens are eroding it. The research is more interesting than the headlines, and the clearest benefits turn out to belong to one group above all: children who are still learning their letters.
A five-year-old grips a pencil too hard and drags it slowly around the shape of a letter, tongue between teeth, while a tablet that could produce the same letter in an instant sits a few inches away. The parent watching wonders whether the struggle is worth it, or whether handwriting is a skill on its way out, like joined-up cursive or reading an analogue clock.
It is a fair question to ask now. Schools have cut the hours children spend forming letters, several countries have dropped cursive from the curriculum, and a child today will do most of their writing on a screen. The screen may not be the end of it either: voice-to-text already turns speech into writing well enough that a child now learning to type may spend much of their adult life dictating instead, with the keyboard following cursive into the past.
Into that shift came a wave of headlines making the opposite case: that writing by hand is vital for the developing brain, and that keyboards are costing children something important. The evidence now shows when that worry is justified, when it is overblown, and what writing by hand actually does for a child.
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Your child's fussiness for food is mostly inherited, and most of the things parents try in order to fix it make it worse. Find out why young children refuse food, why it is rarely a parent's fault, and the unglamorous method that genuinely changes how they eat.
Most of what shapes a young life turns out to be joyful and ordinary. A major new study shows what teenagers themselves treasure, and why the way they answer can tell you how they are really doing.
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