Time for the Kids? A Teaser and a Bleg
Today’s parents are spending dramatically more time on childcare than their parents did. What’s more, this rise has disproportionately occurred among those with the most education.
Today’s parents are spending dramatically more time on childcare than their parents did. What’s more, this rise has disproportionately occurred among those with the most education.
We have blogged a few times about financial and economic illiteracy in the U.S., particularly among young people.
So it’s nice to see a counterexample.
A blog reader named Christopher Galen has sent us his daughter Grace’s third-grade economics quiz. Yes, that’s right: a third-grade economics quiz. She goes to a public school in Fairfax County, Virginia.
Whatever the case, a downturn in bike ridership may strike some people as a grievous strike against the American character. On the other hand, it’s great news for the likes of Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft.
University of Scranton psychology professor Carole Slotterback analyzed about five years’ worth of children’s letters to Santa that were sent to her city’s central post office.
My son Andrew died exactly ten years ago today, October 23, 1999, nine days after his first birthday. No one would describe me as emotional. And yet the wound still remains remarkably raw.
International children’s rights advocates focus significant resources on eliminating child labor in developing countries, often advocating consumer boycotts and international regulation. Despite all these efforts, however, child labor is still prevalent throughout the developing world. Matthias Doepke and Fabrizio Zilibotti think all that international pressure may actually be worsening the child labor problem.
We recently blogged about how recessions might affect the mentality of people growing up in them. American Public Media’s Marketplace recently hosted a “Small Town Hall,” where kids were asked questions like “Should kids be allowed to have credit cards?” and “Has the recession changed your dreams?”
Some say that a major cause of the U.S. housing bubble was a surge in savings overseas, particularly in China, where the personal savings rate soared to 30 percent of disposable income. (In the U.S., meanwhile, we were saving next to nothing). Just why the Chinese were saving so much has been a puzzle to many economists. Now Shang-Jin Wei and Xiaobo Zhang think they’ve come up with an explanation.
A new working paper by Seema Jayachandran and Ilyana Kuziemko offers another explanation for the “missing girls” phenomenon observed in some developing countries. Breast-feeding both improves health outcomes and temporarily decreases fertility. Jayachandran and Kuziemko argue that women with a preference for male children may wean daughters earlier in the hopes of restoring their fertility and conceiving a son, resulting in worse health outcomes for girls. The authors find that daughters are weaned sooner than sons and conclude that the breastfeeding factor explains 14 percent of India’s missing girls.
Levitt was floored by the documentary Smile Pinki, about two children in India who receive free surgery to repair their cleft lips. The documentary, which won an Oscar last year, gets its television premier tonight on HBO at 7 p.m. You can watch the trailer, here.
The problem of children used as soldiers has been gaining visibility since, among other things, former child soldier Ishmael Beah published his memoir. But the image of the child soldier as a young African boy with an assault rifle slung over his shoulder isn’t as descriptive of the problem as you might think.
We love taking our kids to the New York Philharmonic’s Young People’s Concerts, which were made famous by the late, great Leonard Bernstein.
The four programs this year were each devoted to a different “capital of music”: Mozart‘s Vienna, Ravel‘s Paris, Mussorgsky‘s St. Petersberg, and Bernstein’s New York.
Photographer Anna Skladmann‘s “Little Adults” portraits feature children of Russia’s Nouveau-Riche who have “been raised to become ‘Elite’ and behave like little adults.” But as Very Short List wonders, with a financial crisis underway, will Russia’s rich kids start behaving more like kids? (Related: Russia moves ahead of De Beers as the world’s largest diamond producer — and immediately starts . . .
If going to the library is a hassle and you don’t want to pay $20 for a children’s book, plop your kids in front of this website, which offers children’s stories for free. The stories are all original and written by the site’s proprietors, so you won’t find certain books there — but they may be the perfect therapy for . . .
According to a study by scientists at DePauw University in Indiana, people who frowned a lot in photos when they were kids and teenagers are five times more likely to get divorced later in life than those who smiled in their photos. Unlike an earlier study that claimed happiness is “contagious,” the authors in this case don’t argue that smiling . . .
Hoping to harness new parents’ love of photographing their babies, researchers at the University of Washington have put together a computer program that tracks a child’s development in photos. With a photographic record of each milestone (first steps, first word spoken, and so on), pediatricians and parents can better detect early signs of developmental problems. [%comments]
| A new study by Gary Evans and Michelle Schamberg of Cornell University argues that the stress associated with living in poverty reduces the memory capacity of poor children, making it harder for them to learn and escape poverty. Makes you wonder how poverty might be fought in the future. Perhaps more focus on mental-health services, or even church attendance? . . .
My 9-year-old granddaughter announced, “I feel very sorry for my friend Olivia.” “Why?” her father asked her. “Because I will be away and won’t be able to attend her birthday party,” she replied. This struck me as a typical child’s self-centered behavior. But another way of looking at it is that it’s the epitome of altruism. Most young kids view . . .
Yesterday my 7-year-old daughter, Anya, was wearing a T-shirt I’d never seen before. It was a Barack Obama shirt. I asked where it came from. She said that someone gave it to her back in the fall, after he was elected. But why finally wear it now? Well, the kids are on spring break and Anya had a chance to . . .
I asked my ophthalmologist on Friday how his business was doing in the recession, and he said it was stable. He noted, however, that his colleagues who specialize in Lasik surgery had seen a 60 percent drop in business. Clearly, Lasik, which is not reimbursed by most insurance plans, is postponable in times when incomes drop; at least in the . . .
I’m reading a biography about Buckminster Fuller written by Lloyd Steven Sieden. Fuller had a 4-year-old daughter Alexandra who caught the 1918 flu, later got meningitis, and finally was afflicted by polio. Though frail, she managed to survive all these illnesses until the age of 4. It was the fall, and Fuller headed off from New York to Boston by . . .
Saw this poster taped to a lamppost in my neighborhood last weekend. There is so much to admire about it. My first thought concerned the talent/practice angle as espoused by Anders Ericsson.
I played in a bunch of bands when I was a kid. Although we were generally dreadful, playing clumpy versions of bad cover songs at poorly attended basement gigs, it was hard to deny that all that very deliberate practice paid off.
A while back, I wrote about the Game Theorist blog, in which my friend Joshua Gans writes about his adventures as an economist-parent (or equally, as a parent-economist). Each role seems to teach him something about the other, and his passion for both is infectious. He has collected much of this material in his new book Parentonomics, which has recently . . .
For anyone who read, even casually, about the welfare wars of the 1990’s, it seems strange that there is so little conversation, political or otherwise, about the topic these days. That may soon be changing, of course, as the proposed Obama stimulus plan attempts to direct money toward the poorest segments of our population.
Most parents have difficulty deciding how much of the “bad stuff” (war, death, etc.) they should tell their kids about, or when they’re old enough to hear it.
New research from Ulrike Malmendier of the University of California and Stefan Nagel of Stanford identifies another kid-sensitive subject parents might want to avoid for a while: the financial crisis.
My kids’ schools never stopped class to listen to President Bush‘s inauguration speech; but my sense in Connecticut is that many public and private schools stopped normally scheduled classes to listen to Obama‘s inauguration speech. News articles suggested that many schools considered his inauguration address a teachable moment. The empiricist in me wonders whether this phenomenon is more pronounced in . . .
The one question I ask most often about the internet is the following: why do people make such great stuff and then give it away for free? The website Poptropica is a perfect example. Poptropica is a virtual online world in which children take part in adventures that require creativity, persistence, logic, and coordination to solve. If you have kids . . .
I recently saw a remarkable short documentary entitled Smile Pinki. It tells the story of two poverty-stricken young children (one a girl named Pinki) in India who are born with clefts and have the opportunity to receive free surgery to fix their condition. It is incredibly moving. I’m not the only one who feels that way — the movie is . . .
From a reader we’ll call E.K.: I thought you might get a kick out of this photo of my kids, who are big fans of your work. The little one is 6, the older one (who already read Freakonomics) is 10. They had gotten up early Sunday morning and were hanging out reading while we (the parents) slept in. When . . .
My son Nicholas, age 5, recently discovered the internet. Last week I got him an account at Club Penguin, a website for kids. Since then, he has spent hours at a time on Club Penguin. He refuses to come to meals. He throws tantrums if forced to stop. Even when enticed with activities he used to find enjoyable, like terrorizing . . .