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Why are we so afraid to leave our children alone ?  I know I'm guilty, though when my son was about 10, he wanted to be left home alone! But it's turning out that the moral judgments of parents affect perceptions of risk According to newswise.com, leaving a child unattended is considered taboo in today’s intensive parenting atmosphere, despite evidence that American children are safer than ever. "So why are parents denying their children the same freedom and independence that they themselves enjoyed as children? A new study by University of California, Irvine social scientists suggests that our fears of leaving children alone have become systematically exaggerated in recent decades – not because the practice has become more dangerous, but because it has become socially unacceptable." Think, Tiger Mom. When I was a kid, we rode bikes and hiked through the woods of our neighborhood all day and often into the night, hanging out at each other's homes wh...

Who knew? Taking your kids to a museum will help them get better grades than making them study for hours. So says a new study that proclaims that spending quality time with your kids will do them a lot better in school than forcing them to hit the books over and over. Research indicates adolescents are more likely to want to pursue further study if their parents take them to museums rather than homework clubs, according to newswise.com. Researchers found that adolescents who take part in cultural activities with their mother and father were more likely to aspire to continue their studies post-16 than those who didn’t. This is compared to even those who attended homework clubs or participated in extra-curricular activities. Why?  Filial dynamics such as emotional closeness to parents and "cultural capital" were better predictors than more school-driven parent-child interactions, researchers found. In the study, factors relating to family emotional ...

So you've taken your kid's phone away for using it during dinner.  Shut down computer use because he didn't do his homework.  Threatened him with dire consequences for texting while you're talking to him. I've seen it all. But now kids are telling their parents what they want them to stop doing, technology -wise. Not surprisingly, it's, put your phone away when I’m talking to you. Don’t text while you’re driving — not even at red lights. Stop posting photos of me without my permission. Who can't relate? These are some of the rules for Internet and smartphone use that kids would set for their parents, according to a new study by researchers at the University of Washington and University of Michigan, according to newswise.com. The researchers surveyed 249 families with children between the ages of 10 and 17 about their household's most important technology rules and expectations, as well as what made those rules easier or harder to fo...

Now, how about this? Parents of first-born sons and only-child daughters give more.  Say what?  Parents’ charitable giving is affected by the sex of their first child, according to a new study as reported at newswise.com. "The sex of the first-born child affects the likelihood that the parents will give to charity, the amount they give, and the types of causes and organizations they support," says Debra Mesch, the Eileen Lamb O'Gara Chair in Women’s Philanthropy and director of Women's Philanthropy Institute at the Indiana University Lilly Family School of Philanthropy, located on the Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis campus.   "This is an important factor influencing charitable giving that was previously unknown." The study provides the first evidence that the sex of the first-born child influences the parents' giving in two-parent families, but not in single-parent families. Among other key findings of the " Wome...

I don't know about you but when my son was little and carrying on about something, the advice was to ignore him. Now we're learning that just may not be the way to do it. According to a new study , parents who intentionally ignore children’s negative emotions may actually increase their children’s expressions of anger, aggression, and disproportionate emotional behaviors, newswise.com reports. Oh boy. Ignoring children’s emotional outbursts is a strategy commonly employed by parents with a wide range of psychological know-how, drawing on their intuition, family tradition, modeling, or simple desperation.   "For whatever reason, the folks who are developing questionnaires to assess these kinds of behaviors didn’t focus on ignoring responses,” notes Scott P. Mirabile, PhD, assistant professor of psychology at St. Mary’s College of Maryland at the web site. Here's what researchers found: If a child is begging for candy in the checkout aisle and starts...

I'm not so sure about this but a new study has found that if we as parents intrude too much on our kids' computer use , it could be a bad thing.  Uh oh.  Guess I'm guilty. But not of intruding.  More of yelling at him to get off it.  But anyway. According to the University of Haifa, intrusive monitoring of Internet use by parents actually leads adolescents to increase their risky behavior online, newswise.com reports. I keep thinking about a recent episode of "Married," that slightly obscene (but funny) cable show about middle-aged marriage, where the parents of three young girls go to visit another family and the bored dad wanders upstairs to find a computer, and starts looking at porn, only to have the poor pimply teenaged son blamed by the father in the other family when the alarm he set goes off.  Guess you had to be there. Anyway, the study found that parents who very closely monitor their children’s Internet use in an attempt to reduce unsafe onl...

My husband and I argue all the time about trying to do things to make our kid smarter.  He thinks anything less than an "A" is, well, a disgrace.  (Of course, he still remembers the SAT scores of his high school friends -- and we're talking bell bottoms and platform shoes the first time around, here).   I, on the other hand, always an average student, don't think grades matter all that much. Hey, you're talking to someone who got 380 on her math SAT -- and I'm not living under a bridge somewhere! Larry's on our son all the time about his homework, and what he learned in school today and is desperate to help Phillip bring his "B" in honors algebra up to an "A" (never mind that it's a high school course and 8th graders are taking it), and for a short time made him take a course of study through Johns Hopkins in math for gifted students.  And -- here I'm going to brag -- he has turned out pretty smart. But it had nothing to ...

Yet one more thing to feel guilty about. Fighting parents hurt children's ability to recognize and regulate their emotions, according to a new study as reported by newswise.com. Exposure to verbal and physical aggression between parents may hurt a child’s ability to identify and control emotions, according to a longitudinal study led by NYU’s Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development.  The findings also suggest that household chaos and prolonged periods of poverty during early childhood may take a substantial toll on the emotional adjustment of young children. “Our study points to ways in which aggression between parents may powerfully shape children’s emotional adjustment,” says C. Cybele Raver, professor of applied psychology at NYU Steinhardt and the study’s lead author, at newswise.com. “Arguing and fighting is psychologically stressful for the adults caught in conflict; this study demonstrates the costs of that conflict for children in th...

Want to know how good a parent you'll be? Play with dolls. Not just any dolls but ones that having expectant parents role-play interacting with an infant using a doll can help predict which couples may be headed for co-parenting conflicts when their baby arrives, newswise.com reports. Researchers videotaped 182 couples in the third trimester of pregnancy while they played with a doll that they were told represented the baby they were about to have. Researchers analyzed how the couple interacted with each other around the doll. The couples were videotaped again nine months after the birth of their baby to see how they actually played together. Results showed that couples acted as similarly toward each other with the real baby as they did with the doll – in both positive and negative ways. “The extent to which couples support or undermine each other’s interactions with the doll predicts their co-parenting behavior a year later,” said Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan, co-a...

I admit I did it.  Found out the sex of my baby.  But it took me so long to get pregnant, I wasn't interested in any surprises. Now a study has found that moms (and dads) who want to know the sex of their unborn baby are perfectionists, and "may be giving subtle clues about (their) views on proper gender roles," according to newswise.com.  The study found that women who choose not to learn their child’s sex may be more open to new experiences, and combine egalitarian views about the roles of men and women in society with conscientiousness. I've always thought of myself as a risk-taker, but this would prove otherwise.  After losing two pregnancies, I wanted to know everything about this baby -- the health of his heart, his other vital organs, the length of his fingers and toes, and how many.   My husband was more a nervous wreck than I, not sure he really wanted to have children at all. Expectant mothers who scored high on a test of parenting perfectio...

Here's another reason not to lie to our children: those who are lied to are more likely to grow up to be liars and cheaters. I'm not talking those little white lies -- "Yes, Virginia, there's a Santa Claus," but the ones that are really damaging, like whether a child's been adopted or has a different parent than his siblings.    “This is the first experiment confirming what we might have suspected: Lying by an adult affects a child’s honesty," newswise.com quotes Leslie Carver,  associate professor of psychology and human development in the UC San Diego Division of Social Sciences.   Experimenters had children ages three to seven listen to music coming from a toy they couldn't see.  Some of it was recognizable to the kids but a classical music piece, was not. When this music sounded, the adult left the room for 90 seconds.  The kids were explicitly told not to look for the toy. Here's the catch: some of the children had been told there was...

I remember when I was a new parent being terrified and overwhelmed at all the advice people threw at me. Don't pick him up when he's crying.  Do pick him up.  Don't feed him formula, breast milk is better.  Do feed him formula, it doesn't matter.  And my favorite, let him cry it out at night.  Which, I never did, anyway. (New parents: maybe that's why he's such a poor sleeper now.) Except for the last, I learned what to do over time, as I got to know my infant.  But now researchers are back to scaring parents again.  A new study has found that many parents have infant-feeding TV and activity practices which may promote a risk for obesity in their offspring later in life. According to newswise.com, " Black parents were more likely to put children to bed with a bottle and report TV watching, while Hispanic parents were more likely to encourage children to finish feeding and to report less 'tummy time' – when a baby lies on her belly to play while...

I had those friends who bought all the Baby Einstein tapes and started using them when their babies were in utero.  And there's that commercial where two-year-olds are reading Shakespeare. But a new study  has found that these parents can no longer feel superior.  Babies cannot learn to read. “While we cannot say with full assurance that infants at this age cannot learn printed words, our results make clear they did not learn printed words from the baby media product that was tested,” says Susan Neuman, a professor in NYU Steinhardt’s Department of Teaching and Learning and the study’s senior author, at newswise.com   Let's face it. We all want to believe our kids are special, even gifted. (My mother always used to brag I spoke in full sentences at one.) But the truth is that, while they may be, the only ones these products have an influence on are -- parents. In exit interviews, newswise reports, "There was the belief among parents that their babies were lea...

Your daughter's eating habits drive you crazy.  A yogurt for breakfast, a pear for lunch, and a salad for dinner.  But you know what?  Bugging her about it, even just talking to her about it, can make for even more unhealthy behavior, a new study has found. According to newswise.com, "Conversations between parents and adolescents that focus on weight and size are associated with an increased risk for unhealthy adolescent weight-control behaviors." The study also found that overweight or obese adolescents whose mothers talked only healthful eating behaviors were less likely to diet and use unhealthy weight-control behaviors and a significantly lower chance of dieting (40 percent to over 53 percent, respectively). “Because adolescence is a time when more youths engage in disordered eating behaviors, it is important for parents to understand what types of conversations may be helpful or harmful in regard to disordered eating behaviors and how to have these conversatio...

Uh oh.  Having more siblings protects you from divorce later in life as an adult.  That's according to a new study . Now, my son, Phillip, is an only child but I'm hoping he's in the  50% who stays married, anyway.  But I have a while to wait.  He's only 12. The new study found that "growing up with siblings may definitely provide some protection against divorce as an adult."  And the more siblings, the better. Each additional sibling a person has (up to about seven) reduces the chance he'll divorce by 2 percent. More siblings didn’t provide additional protection, although they did not hurt, either. “But when you compare children from large families to those with only one child, there is a meaningful gap in the probability of divorce,” newswise.com quotes Doug Downey, co-author of the study and professor of sociology at The Ohio State University. Why? One of the biggest surprises of the study was that it wasn’t the difference between being an...

Phew.  I just found out I don't have to worry that my son will turn out to be a loser. That's what people have pretty much always said about kids who have no siblings .  For many reasons including age, financial considerations and a slight case of breast cancer when he was 3, Phillip has wound up with no brother or sister (I have one of each, neither of whom I speak to). I remember a friend, when our boys were toddlers, worrying that her son would be damaged for life without a sibling (she and her husband planned to stop at one).  She even bought books about only children and the harm life held out for them. Then she got pregnant again, and all her worries went away.  Except, now they were mine. I've felt guilty for not being able to gift Phillip with siblings.  Growing up, yes, we fought in my house, but it was fun (most of the time) having a brother, and sometimes, even a sister (she was seven years younger so we didn't spend much time together). Sad...