It’s summer and Facebook news feeds are awash with idyllic, sun-drenched snapshots of family life. This kind of “sharenting” is bigger than ever but we rarely stop to think about whether it is appropriate…
Happiness was assumed in medieval times as the inevitable outcome for a child who lived his life right.
AAP/ Joe Castro
Are you a helicopter parent, hovering around your offspring at all times? Perhaps “snowplow” or “free range” is more your style. Or maybe, you should give medieval parenting a shot. Much of the advice…
Heeding four key messages can make learning to drive a safe and happy experience.
Bridie Scott-Parker
Learner drivers and parents are often thrown in the deep end when it comes to learning to drive and recording hours in the logbook. As part of a unique approach to improving young driver road safety, I…
For decades, child-care advice claimed that motherhood was a natural quality: the task of the parenting expert, it was claimed, was to help mothers to realise their “natural” mothering potential. In practice…
Leisel Jones (centre, in 2010) has 10 gold Commonwealth medals to her name – on par with Susie O'Neill and Ian Thorpe. Is the next swimming star in your family?
AAP/Dave Hunt
Australia has kicked off the Commonwealth Games with a bang, winning 17 medals in the first day of competition, including five gold medals. The women’s 4 x 100m freestyle relay had a particularly successful…
According to NatCen research, British fathers are among the worst in Europe at making time for their families. Spending huge amounts of time at work is seen as a sign of discipline and commitment, while…
Not long ago, an email went around some of the academic lists I subscribe to entitled “New parenting study released”. Heart sinking a little as I clicked the link to a New Yorker article, I expected to…
Same-sex parents are more likely to share child care and work responsibilities more equitably than other families.
Jessica Lucia/Flickr
It’s often suggested that children with same-sex parents have poorer outcomes because they’re missing a parent of a particular sex. But research my colleagues and I published in the journal BMC Public…
Many professional authors are also parents, but recently, there have been a number of success stories of parents simply writing for their own children and becoming very successful. And this recent surge…
A recent report from the Sutton Trust is the latest in a line of recommendations for family policy to focus on promoting secure attachment between parents and their children. What puzzles me is why the…
Is that you, dad? SBS documentary questions oft-quoted figures on dads who are not the real father of their children.
Shutterstock
How confident are you that the man you call dad is really your biological father? If you believe some of the most commonly-quoted figures, you could be forgiven for not being very confident at all. But…
In simple ways at home, parents can improve their child’s cognitive ability and ready them for learning.
Shutterstock
Student achievement has been found to be most influenced by parents’ aspirations and expectations for their children’s development along with active involvement in their learning. Parents must be supporters…
It seems there is an emerging cross-party consensus on the need to change the criminal law on child neglect in this country. The most recent manifestation of this new consensus are new proposals to criminalise…
A newly proposed “Cinderella law” seeks to make parents’ “emotional abuse” of their children a criminal offence in England and Wales. Under it, parents who deliberately ignore children, subject them to…
The UK government and many other interested international bodies are duly concerned about the proliferation of internet pornography. The latest development under consideration is the use of licenses to…
The benefits children gain from Authoritative parenting benefit their own children in turn.
Angerboy
Pop culture parenting styles like “Helicopter” and “Snowplow” have received a lot of recent media attention. Such coverage tends to overlook the findings of decades of parenting research. Much of this…
Overly positive, inflated praise such as “terrific!”, “you did incredibly well!”, “perfect!” is very common in western countries. At first glance this might not seem a bad thing; heaping praise can only…
New mothers make a lot of decisions to improve their babies’ welfare.
Megan Myers
Stop press! Actress Julia Roberts has been spotted in a Prius and is reportedly into reusable coffee cups and solar panels. According to media reports, it was the birth of her twins, rather than her Oscar-winning…
Professor, Canada Research Chair in Determinants of Child Development, Owerko Centre at the Alberta Children’s Hospital Research Institute, University of Calgary
Assistant professor, School of Psychology, Scientist, Children's Hospital of Eastern Ontario Research Institute, L’Université d’Ottawa/University of Ottawa