The Parent Portal Weekly

We hand children worksheets to practise reading comprehension, as if it were a muscle. A famous experiment with a baseball passage suggests we've misunderstood what comprehension actually is - and why some children read every word and still miss the story.

More children are arriving at school unable to hold a pencil, use scissors or fasten their own coat. Occupational therapists say the reason isn't the screen itself - it's the hundreds of small, fiddly jobs a screen quietly replaced.

You are told, gently and often, that raising a child with two languages will make them talk late and muddle their words. The research says almost the opposite - and the story of how we got the bigger promise wrong is stranger than either side of the argument.

We hand our children labels before they can spell their own names: the responsible eldest, the easygoing middle, the spoiled youngest. The biggest studies ever done say the labels barely hold - but the newest one found something we got wrong in a more interesting way.

It feels like the kindest thing you can say. But one sentence handed to four hundred children in a lab flipped how they handled the next hard thing they faced - and nearly four in ten of one group ended up lying about their scores.

Short-sightedness in children has more than doubled in fifty years, and most of us blame the wrong thing. The real culprit isn't the screen itself. It's what a child stops doing while staring at one.

Ask a teacher whether children learn better in their preferred style and most will say yes. Twenty years of research says no. The idea that won't die may be quietly limiting the children it was meant to help.

One of the most cited findings on family meals isn't really about food. A Harvard researcher who recorded hundreds of family dinners found that the unusual words children hear at the table predict reading ability later better than being read to does. The decline of those dinners has been quiet but steep.

For fifty years, the marshmallow test has been parenting folklore: patient four-year-olds turn into successful adults. A 2018 replication with ten times more children found the famous link almost disappeared. What was left tells a different story about what self-control really is.

Half of British families read aloud to their toddler most nights. By the time the child turns nine, only one in six are still doing it. The research on what books deliver that ordinary conversation cannot suggests we are stopping at the wrong age.