The hard truth about meddling is that when parents insist on a particular class assignment for their children, they can end up helping their own kid at the expense of someone else’s. Class assignments are a zero-sum game: If your kid gets the teacher you like and escapes the mediocre or rotten alternative, another kid will be taking his place. For sure, parents talk themselves around this. They say it’s their job to put their own kids’ interests first. Or if they have an older child who has had a run-in with a teacher, they figure the family has already done its time and now deserves a break. Or they talk in code about how a teacher or a combination of classmates is just not the right fit for their child, though they’re sure the setting will do everyone else’s just fine. link to continue reading
The advantage that children get from living in two-parent families may actually be due to family stability more than the fact that their parents are married.
A new study finds that children who who are born and grow up in stable single-parent homes generally do as well as those in married households in terms of academic abilities and behavior problems.
“Many of the studies that show an advantage for children who grow up in married households versus those who grow up with single parents don’t distinguish between family structure and family stability,” said Claire Kamp Dush, author of the study and assistant professor of human development and family science at Ohio State University. [continue reading…]
Parents of teenagers are doing a good job, and poor parenting is not the reason for the increase in problem behaviour amongst teenagers, a new briefing paper published today by the Nuffield Foundation reveals.Â
 Research undertaken by a team led by Professor Frances Gardner from the Department of Social Policy and Social Work at the University of Oxford found no evidence of a general decline in parenting.Â
The findings show that differences in parenting according to family structure and income have narrowed over the last 25 years. However, the task of parenting is changing and could be getting increasingly stressful, particularly for some groups. [continue reading…]
Source:A Place of our Own *A Place of Our Own (and Los Niños en Su Casa in Spanish) is a daily television series, a website, and an extensive outreach program devoted to the unique needs of people who care for children.
