.. casual observation would suggest what surveys have also found, that children in Britain have a more difficult and less attractive existence than children in any other comparable country in Europe.
.. It used to be said that three-quarters of British children have a television in their bedrooms. If so, there are more children with such televisions than with their biological fathers living at home.
The Case for Free-Range Parenting
On Halloween, when everybody was out to trick or treat, we were surprised by how many children actually lived here whom we had never seen.
.. A study by the University of California, Los Angeles, has found that American kids spend 90 percent of their leisure time at home, often in front of the TV or playing video games. Even when kids are physically active, they are watched closely by adults, either in school, at home, at afternoon activities or in the car, shuttling them from place to place.
.. It is hard for parents to balance the desire to protect their children against the desire to make them more self-reliant.
Darwin’s Kids Doodled on Original Draft of “Origin of Species”
Among the twenty-six thousand pages that have so far been digitized are fifty-seven pages of the Darwin children’s drawings—nine of them on the back of the manuscript of “On the Origin of Species.”
What may seem like sacrilege now—turning the only handwritten copy of a seminal work of science into scratch paper—appears to have been normal then. Once Darwin had sent a fair copy of the manuscript off to his publisher, John Murray, he made the rest of his changes to the book directly on the galley proofs, and evidently he wasn’t precious about the originals. Paper being a hot commodity, the children co-opted the pages for themselves.
.. Part of the joy of these images, of course, is what they imply about Darwin—not the stereotype of a tortured, isolated great thinker but the abettor of scientific curiosity in others as much as in himself. Indeed, he often put his children to work on his research. “The kids were used as volunteers—to collect butterflies, insects, and moths, and to make observations on plants in the fields around town,” Kohn said.
The poorer parents are, the less they talk with their children.
In the nineteen-eighties, two child psychologists at the University of Kansas, Betty Hart and Todd Risley, began comparing, in detail, how parents of different social classes talked with their children.
.. But the researchers also found that the wealthier parents consistently talked more with their kids. Among the professional families, the average number of words that children heard in an hour was twenty-one hundred and fifty; among the working-class families, it was twelve hundred and fifty; among the welfare families, it was six hundred and twenty. Over time, these daily differences had major consequences, Hart and Risley concluded: “With few exceptions, the more parents talked to their children, the faster the children’s vocabularies were growing and the higher the children’s I.Q. test scores at age 3 and later.”