20 articles found
The older child who responded to the news of a new baby with delight may now be hitting the baby, refusing to eat, and wetting the bed again at 3.5 ye...
Most under-three screen-time advice comes wrapped in either guilt or finger-wagging. Neither is useful. The real picture is more practical: under-twos...
The "my child is wired after watching that show" feeling has more research behind it than most parents realise. The evidence is not on the absolute le...
The TV in the corner playing the news while the baby crawls around the rug feels harmless. Nobody is *watching*. The damage it does is precisely becau...
Before a baby can say a word, they can do something quietly remarkable: look at something, then look at you, then look back at the thing — to make sur...
A 3-year-old standing in the middle of a tidy playroom announcing "I have nothing to do" is, in that moment, doing something developmentally important...
"How long should my toddler be able to play alone?" is one of the questions health visitors hear most, usually phrased as worry that the child can't m...
A two-year-old's attention span is short, and that fact often gets read fatalistically — as if the wiring were fixed. It isn't. The prefrontal circuit...
"My child can't play alone for two minutes" is one of the most common things parents tell me, and it's almost never about the child being defective at...
With more than one child, one-on-one time is the first thing to go. Bath, dinner, bedtime — efficiency wins, and you end up parenting the group. The c...
"Mental presence" sounds like a yoga concept and is really a measurable thing — Tronick has been measuring it for half a century, Adrian Ward has been...
A surprisingly small thing — a parent on the floor at the child's eye level, not on a phone, doing whatever the child is already doing — is the active...
When a second child arrives, parents often experience a sudden, concrete realisation: there is one of me and two of them. Every moment with the baby i...
The difficulty in knowing when to seek professional assessment for a young child's anxiety is that most anxiety in this age group is developmentally n...
"He just can't concentrate on anything" is one of the most common parental concerns about toddlers, and it is usually a description of entirely age-ap...
Executive function is the set of cognitive skills that sit behind a child's ability to plan a sequence of actions, hold information in mind while usin...
"My toddler can't sit still for five minutes" is one of the most common things parents say, and most of the time, it describes something completely no...
ADHD in adolescence looks different from ADHD in childhood. The visible hyperactivity that had your 7-year-old climbing the back of the sofa often goe...
ADHD is one of the most common and most misread childhood conditions. Some children get the label too easily, simply for being energetic. Others, part...
Most toddlers are inattentive, fidgety, and impulsive. That is normal development, not a disorder. The genuinely hard question for parents and teacher...