“Play has become a four-letter word.” So says Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, a psychologist at Temple University and one of the authors of a new paper about the importance of play in children’s […]

Imagine a drug that could enhance a child’s creativity, critical thinking and resilience. Imagine that this drug were simple to make, safe to take, and could be had for free. […]

Turn on your TV and surf the stuff meant for kids. I dare you. You’ll likely find a surfeit of fast action and fart jokes. And that’s what makes Esme & […]

“Why are traffic lights red, yellow and green?” When a child asks you a question like this, you have a few options. You can shut her down with a “Just […]

Smartphones have by now been implicated in so many crummy outcomes—car fatalities, sleep disturbances, empathy loss, relationship problems, failure to notice a clown on a unicycle—that it almost seems easier to list […]

What can you do to help your kids play happily this summer while still learning and building skills? Educational researchers have documented the phenomenon known as summer slide, in which many students […]

If children were to run, climb, slide, or scale a wall at a normal library, they would likely get annoyed glances from patrons before being hushed by a librarian and […]

What if parents didn’t have to take kids to a playground to get in some fun activity — but instead, the play space came to them? That’s the idea behind […]

Deb Roy and Rupal Patel pulled into their driveway on a fine July day in 2005 with the beaming smiles and sleep-deprived glow common to all first-time parents. Pausing in […]

When I was a child in small-town West Virginia, there weren’t many options for entertainment after school or on weekends: I could walk to a friend’s house. I could watch […]

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 […]

To learn the word “the,” Kristen Bauter’s kindergartners used to sit at their desks with a worksheet and circle words scattered across the page. Now, the 5-year-olds stand at a […]

A baby lab is installing games in urban spaces to teach problem-solving and creativity. Kathy Hirsh-Pasek has a vision: she would like to see children all over the world waiting […]

Play is a universal, cross-cultural and necessary attribute of childhood, essential for development and essential for learning. Experts who study it say that play is intrinsic to children’s natures, but […]

I often have my phone in my hand while breastfeeding my one-year-old daughter. This isn’t a confession, because I don’t feel guilty about it. Even though there are lots of […]

Becoming too connected used to be an issue kids had with stuffed animals and pacifiers. Now it’s a matter of smart phones and tablets. And whether this is a positive […]

The results are in. Seventy-eight percent of Trump supporters and 97% of Clinton supporters strongly endorse the need for universal access to affordable early childhood education (First Five Years Fund).  […]

Active learning, playful learning, flipped classrooms, team-based learning – this plethora of new terms highlights an effort designed to align the way we teach with the science of how children learn. […]

Picture this: You’re in the supermarket with your hungry preschooler in tow. As you reach into the dairy case, you spot a sign with a friendly cartoon cow. It reads: […]

Cities can create outside-the-classroom learning opportunities for low-income children by encouraging communities to reimage everyday locations in their neighborhoods as places for playful learning. What if a bench were not […]

In this podcast, Hirsh-Pasek and Golinkoff discuss ways to reimagine what successful learning looks like in a global world using six major skills that will help kids succeed beyond traditional […]

Dr. Kathryn Hirsh-Pasek and Dr. Roberta Golinkoff’s book, Becoming Brilliant: What science tells us about raising successful children just launched at The Brookings Institution.  Click here to learn more about this achievement!

“Why are traffic lights red, yellow and green?” When a child asks you a question like this, you have a few options. You can shut her down with a “Just […]

Reading to very young children is crucial to help them eventually learn to read. But researchers studying how kids begin to understand that text conveys meaning differently than pictures — […]

Parents want to give their kids the best chance to learn and grow – even from a very young age. But it can be difficult to know if that ipad […]

Baby laptops, baby cellphones, talking farms — these are the whirring, whiz-bang toys of the moment, many of them marketed as tools to encourage babies’ language skills. But in the […]

A small survey of parents in Philadelphia found that three-quarters of their children had been given tablets, smartphones or iPods of their own by age 4 and had used the […]

Tens of thousands of supposedly educational apps aimed at young children are little more than “digital candy” that offer few benefits for youngsters, according to a new study. The research, […]

Imagine someone telling you that a new technology would be available in five years that has the potential to revolutionize childhood and early education. But the downside is that you […]

It has been nearly 20 years since a landmark education study found that by age 3, children from low-income families have heard 30 million fewer words than more affluent children, […]

Clifford the Big Red Dog looks fabulous on an iPad. He sounds good, too — tap the screen and hear him pant as a blue truck roars into the frame. […]

Every age of parenthood — and parenthood at every age — yields some discouraging metric, some new rating system on which parents can be judged and found wanting. We endlessly […]

GoldieBlox kits aren’t like other construction toys. Instead of coming in primary colors, or in drab military tones, the kits are pastel: a platform the shade of a robin’s egg, […]

I had no idea that my daughter was watching me, that she’d followed me into the attic, that she was standing right there. I’d gone up last fall to wrap […]

With the advent of tablet apps for children, parents may be tempted to forgo purchasing those blocks and puzzles that have been staples in children’s toy chests for centuries. A […]

Students today may have less time for free play, but new research suggests their imaginations have actually sharpened compared with children two decades ago. In an analysis published in May […]

Children’s play is threatened, say experts who advise that kids – from toddlers to tweens – should be relearning how to play. Roughhousing and fantasy feed development. Havely Taylor knows […]

Thousands of children, from toddlers to 12-year-olds, did something yesterday that seems almost novel in the age of computers and digital games: They went outside and played. In the chilly […]

ON command, Eze Schupfer reads aloud the numbers on a worksheet in front of her: “42, 43, 12, 13.” Then she begins to trace them. “Is that how we write […]

It is an eternal question – do children really benefit from learning at a very early age? Head, heart and hand, India Avnika Menon goes to Leapbridge International Preschool in […]

Schools across the country are cutting back on free time and recess in favor of bottoms-in-the-chair instruction. That’s a problem, say some researchers, not simply because kids have too much […]

Lucas Sherman and Aniyah McKenzie are building a house in Central Park. It is small, even by Manhattan standards, and the amenities leave something to be desired. But Lucas, who […]

SARAH WILSON was speaking proudly the other day when she declared: “My house is a little messy.” Ms. Wilson lives in Stroudsburg, Pa., a small town in the Poconos. Many […]

“We’ve always assumed play and learning are divorced— but really, they’re really not.  As opposed to saying ‘Learning vs. Play,’ we should be saying ‘Learning via Play.’”  Here more of […]