Word: childhood
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...trend that has been developing for decades?the creative death of playtime. "The most imaginative play takes place when children have gaps in information that need to be filled," says Susan Linn, an instructor in psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and co-founder of Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood. A generic babydoll, for example, needs a child to give her a personality, a family, what a screenwriter would call a backstory. A teddy bear needs something to do, a plot. But, "when children see the film and then they have all the toys, there's less room to experiment...
Maybe because we idealize bright summer more than any other season, its darkness takes us by surprise, like finding a spider in your sandal. Savoring summer is a habit tattooed from childhood, along with sunburn scars and callused heels and memories of original sins, a first beer smuggled behind the grandstand, cigarettes sneaked in the woods, curfews broken because it's too hot to sleep. The flip side of summer freedom is anarchy, the structures of school and work melted into casual Fridays and long weekends spent playing on grass now baked to beige by drought...
Spurred by appeals for research-based recommendations on early childhood education from state legislators and recent findings in neuroscience, the report’s authors developed six recommendations for revamping childhood policies in an effort to improve education, health, and productivity in the long...
...authors state that policies targeting early childhood development “can generate benefits to society that far exceed program costs,” provided they satisfy certain “effectiveness factors,” which, according to Shonkoff, “predict for us which programs influence positive outcomes for children and which will be less effective...
Neufeld echoed these sentiments, and, citing longterm effects of childhood development on economic competitiveness, crime rates, and health care costs, stressed the importance of grounding policies in research...