The Education Gender Gap: APA Task Force looks at How to Help Boys Succeed in School

The April/May, 2023 edition of the Monitor on Psychology, the bimonthly magazine of the American Psychological Association, led with a cover story about helping boys and young men succeed in the classroom (Abrams, 2023). The article was introduced with a bold statement: “At school, by almost every metric, boys of all ages are doing worse…

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American Psychological Association Publishes Guidelines on Social Media Use for Children and Adolescents

Social media, like any technology, is neither inherently good nor bad. Its value lies in how we choose to use it. To encourage the positive use of social media and discourage harmful practices among children and adolescents, the American Psychological Association (APA), an organization with 146,000 members, has published a series of recommendations and advisories…

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Awareness and Sympathy May Be Key Components of Guilt for Children

Guilt is a negative emotion, but it’s a negative emotion that to some extent is good. If no one ever felt guilt, the world would be a scary place indeed! One question about guilt is how the tendency to feel guilt develops in childhood. We know that some children feel guiltier than other children when…

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What a Connection to Nature Means for Kids

It’s a common complaint that kids these days don’t get outside enough. There may be something to that claim, as well, with parents of 8 to 12 year olds saying in one survey that their children spent three times as much time playing on screens as playing outside. Intuitively, you might suspect that children who…

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Short Interval Between Children Ups Risk of Divorce

We all like a fairytale love story, but psychologists are just as interested in stories about marriages that fall apart. That much is clear from a study I wrote about last year, in which researchers surveyed a couple thousand residents of Denmark about their reasons for divorce. Participants found a whole range of shortcomings in…

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Do Children Imitate Differently Across Cultures?

Children have a lot to learn, and one of the ways they meet that formidable challenge is by imitating others. They’ll imitate the good things see. They’ll imitate the bad things they see. As I’ve written about before, they’ll even imitate robots. What’s less clear is whether children in different cultures practice the art of…

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Hungry Kids Don’t Like to Share

It’s hard to be concerned with lofty philosophical principles when you’re hungry. A new study from researchers at University of Chicago underscores this point in the context of an ethical dilemma that children face every day: whether to share. Of course, children aren’t the only ones who need to remember to share, but this particular…

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In Neighborhoods With Faster Internet, Children Feel Worse About Their Lives

Who wouldn’t want a faster internet connection? Kids who want to feel good about their lives, maybe. A new analysis of data from 6,300 children carried about by researchers at University of Sheffield has come up with the finding that in neighborhoods with faster broadband speed, children and teenagers report feeling worse about their lives.…

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A Happiness Intervention for Teachers

Teaching is a stressful job. From managing a classroom, to taking work home at night, to trying to adequately explain new concepts and keep pace with a curriculum at the same time, teachers have a lot of demands to juggle. That’s a problem not just for teachers, but for the education system as a whole.…

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