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Parents/carers of children aged 4-10 years of age reported that over a one-month period in lockdown, they saw increases in their child's emotional difficulties, such as feeling unhappy, worried, being clingy and experiencing physical symptoms associated with worry, according to early results from the Co-SPACE study, asking parents and carers about their children's mental health through the COVID-19 crisis.

Yalda T. Uhls is child psychologist and researcher at UCLA, who studies how media affect children. She is the author of the book "Media Moms & Digital Dads: A Fact Not Fear Approach to Parenting in the Digital Age." This article originally appeared in The Conversation. An essential social skill is understanding emotion.

New research suggests enrichment programs help children solidify the information they have added to their wall of knowledge How humans organize information plays an integral role in memory, reasoning and the ability to acquire new knowledge. In the absence of routine education programs, the pandemic is exacerbating the disparities in educational opportunities available for children to develop new skills.

Are today's children, who grew up with mobile technology from birth, worse at reading emotions and picking up cues from people's faces than children who didn't grow up with tablets and smar tp hones' A new UCLA psychology study suggests today's kids are all right. Infancy and early childhood are critical developmental phases during which children learn to interpret important non-verbal cues such as facial expressions, tone of voice and gestures.

Parents should not feel pressured to make their young children undertake structured learning or achieve specific tasks, particularly during lockdown. A new study of children under the age of two has found that parents who take a more flexible approach to their child's learning can - for children who were easy babies - minimise behavioural problems during toddlerhood.

With thousands of schools and preschools closed and many states under "stay-at-home” orders to try to limit the spread of the novel coronavirus, families are facing a tough situation: trying to work - possibly remotely - while simultaneously being responsible for their children's education. University of Washington researchers are beginning a national study to help families discover technology that helps them both successfully navigate home-based learning and combat social isolation.

Different learning difficulties do not correspond to specific regions of the brain, as previously thought, say researchers at the University of Cambridge. Instead poor connectivity between 'hubs' within the brain is much more strongly related to children's difficulties. Between 14-30% of children and adolescents worldwide have learning difficulties severe enough to require additional support.

Parents who experience food insecurity might think they're protecting their children from their family's food situation by eating less or different foods so their children can be spared. But a new study led by University of Michigan researchers shows that children know more about food insecurity-the state of being without reliable access to a sufficient quantity of affordable, nutritious food-than their parents give them credit for.

Century-old theories that having girls or boys 'runs in families' have been upended by a University of Queensland study, proving parents' genes do not determine their child's gender. Dr Brendan Zietsch from UQ's School of Psychology said the study was the largest conducted on the often-debated question, and concluded the sex of offspring is essentially random.

Researchers from the University of Geneva and CY Cergy Paris University have shown that current situations conjure up past situations that share deep, structural, similarities. What clues does our memory use to connect a current situation to a situation from the past? The results of a study conducted by researchers from the University of Geneva , Switzerland, - working in collaboration with CY Cergy Paris University in France - contrast sharply with the explanations found until now in the existing literature.

Parents often put their own relationship on the back burner to concentrate on their children, but a new study shows that when spouses love each other, children stay in school longer and marry later in life. Research about how the affection between parents shapes their children's long-term life outcomes is rare because the data demands are high.

Altruistic helping - the act of giving away something desirable, even at a cost to oneself - is perhaps no more evident than when it comes to food. Human adults often respond to hungry people, whether through food banks or fundraisers, or by simply handing over their lunch. But when, and how, does that spirit of giving start? New research by the University of Washington's Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences, or I-LABS, finds that altruism may begin in infancy.

Used in virtually all of the world's languages, parentese is a speaking style that draws baby's attention. Parents adopt its simple grammar and words, plus its exaggerated sounds, almost without thinking about it. But if parents knew the way they speak could help baby learn, would they alter their speech? A new study from the Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences, or I-LABS, at the University of Washington suggests they would, to baby's benefit.

A study evaluating the effectiveness of the widely used 'Daily Mile' intervention in schools to tackle childhood obesity has found that the benefits are small, and may be greater in girls than boys. The study concludes that whilst interventions such as The Daily Mile are not going to reduce childhood obesity alone, they could be an important part of a wider population strategy to tackling this challenge.

A study evaluating the effectiveness of the widely used 'Daily Mile' intervention in schools to tackle childhood obesity has found that the benefits are small, and may be greater in girls than boys. The study concluded that whilst interventions such as The Daily Mile are not going to reduce childhood obesity alone, they could be an important part of a wider population strategy to tackling this challenge.

A public ban on smoking in cars in England and Wales has led to fewer children being exposed to cigarette smoke, according to new analysis. England and Wales banned smoking in cars carrying children in 2015, with Scotland introducing a ban the following year. But to date, the impact of the legislation on children's exposure to cigarette smoke has been unclear.

Knowledge of multiple languages has long been shown to have lifelong benefits, from enhancing communication skills to boosting professional opportunities to staving off the cognitive effects of aging. When researchers at the University of Washington found that even babies whose parents are monolingual could rapidly learn a second language in a small classroom environment, a new challenge was born: How could they expand their program?

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Stay-at-home parents are likely to tweet anti-spanking beliefs and desires, but those 280-character messages may not always convey what's happening in homes. Despite growing research that spanking leads to children's behavior problems, many parents still support the use of spanking-and among such parents are those who may turn to Twitter and present themselves in a positive manner when discussing child discipline and spanking, according to a new University of Michigan study.

A new study from researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison shows that the young children of parents who take part in a compassion-based training program develop lower levels of the stress hormone cortisol over time.