Children

As students return to the classroom this fall, one large group of children will be more likely than their peers to suffer learning disabilities, ADD/ADHD, behavioral problems, chronic school absence, and a host of other health concerns. These are the 2.7 million US children coping with the stress of parental incarceration.

Here's news that won't surprise any parents: Raising children is really expensive. According to recent Department of Agriculture projections, middle income U.S. parents who had a child in 2013 should expect to spend about $245,340 before she hits 18. And parents raising children under the age of 18 in U.S.

The difference between what the rich and poor eat in America begins long before a baby can walk, or even crawl. A team of researchers at the University at Buffalo School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences found considerable differences in the solid foods babies from different socioeconomic classes were being fed.

In America, what you earn depends largely on your success in school. Unfortunately, your success in school depends largely on what your parents earn. It's an intergenerational Catch 22 that's at the heart of modern poverty. Keep that in mind while looking at the monstrously depressing map up above, which comes courtesy of a new report by the Southern Education Foundation.

Cue the hand-wringing about digital distraction: Fewer children are reading books frequently for fun, according to a new report released Thursday by Scholastic, the children's book publisher. In a 2014 survey of just over 1,000 children ages 6 to 17, only 31 percent said they read a book for fun almost daily, down from 37 percent four years ago.

In the late 1980s, when the crack cocaine epidemic was ravaging America's cities, Hallam Hurt, a neonatologist in Philadelphia, worried about the damage being done to children born to addicted mothers. She and her colleagues, studying children from low-income families, compared four-year-olds who'd been exposed to the drug with those who hadn't.

America's child poverty rate, currently at 22 percent-highest in the developed world-is one of our nation's gravest problems. Fortunately, we know what tools work when it comes to combating child poverty. The question is, why aren't we using them? On January 22, the Bernard L.

Why is it easy for some people to learn to read, and difficult for others? It's a tough question with a long history. We know that it's not just about raw intelligence, nor is it wholly about repetition and dogged persistence. We also know that there are some conditions that, effort aside, can hold a child back.

It's not just the people in prison who are paying the punishment for their crimes. Children of incarcerated parents are more likely to suffer a variety of mental, physical and behavioral health issues than those whose parents are not incarcerated, a new study finds.

Paid parental leave is a great benefit for new parents like me, and it makes a lot of sense for employers of higher-end workers (like Vox Media!) to offer it. But plenty of Americans aren't so fortunate in their current employment arrangements, and recently lots of Democrats have talked about getting the government involved in making sure more people can take leave.

In recent years there have been a lot of articles about the importance of teaching children empathy. As a psychotherapist (and a mom) who specializes in relationships, I could not agree more. I am hopeful that the emphasis on empathy will help children become happier people with more fulfilling relationships.

Ask parents how important it is to instill kindness in their kids, and most will rank it high: even as their very top priority, according to Harvard researchers. But children surveyed by the university's Making Caring Common (pdf) project said, overwhelmingly, that they were getting a different message.

Whether you call a child "gifted" or "disabled," labels can influence future behavior in subtle and insidious ways. Please consider disabling it for our site, or supporting our work in one of these ways Subscribe Now > Scott Barry Kaufman knew he was different from his classmates.