Pretend-play is a favorite pastime for American children. They mentally transform the here and now, preparing pretend meals in toy kitchens, frolicking around on fake horses, and feeding baby dolls with plastic bottles. By age 4, children spend approximately 20% of their waking hours engaged in such play, and yet More
The mass shooting in Parkland, Florida, isn’t fading quietly from the headlines like so many acts of gun violence before it. Nearly two weeks after 17 people were killed at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, media attention is still focused on the survivors and parents of victims who are demanding More
Police say they lived in squalor for years, malnourished and deprived of contact with the outside world. Their parents are accused of torturing them. Now on the road to recovery, David and Louise Turpin’s seven adult children are turning to music to help them heal. They’ve been learning to play More
A Washington Post analysis found that more than 150,000 students attending at least 170 primary or secondary schools in the United States have experienced a shooting on campus since the 1999 Columbine High School massacre, which is sometimes cited as the first in a string of modern mass school shootings. More
Machines that learn like children provide deep insights into how the mind and body act together to bootstrap knowledge and skills. Deon, a fictional engineer in the 2015 sci-fi film Chappie, wants to create a machine that can think and feel. To this end, he writes an artificial-intelligence program that More
Children from the poorer strata of society begin life not only with material disadvantages but cognitive ones. Decades of research have confirmed this, including a famous 1995 finding by psychologists Betty Hart and Todd Risley: By age four children reared in poverty have heard 30 million fewer words, on average More
