If your preschooler stutters – repeating words or initial word sounds over and over, unable to get out what he wants to say – he’s in good company. A recent study of over 1600 children found that 11% of four-year-olds stutter or had stuttered when younger. This is more than twice the previous estimates of the incidence of stuttering.

So stuttering is more “normal” than we’d thought. In addition, stuttering is not, as we’d thought, a big problem. Children who stutter do not have poorer outcomes than other kids. In fact, the study found that stuttering was associated with better language development, better non-verbal skills, and excellent adjustment, compared to other non-stuttering four-year-olds.

If your child stutters, it’s not a huge cause for worry.

This is a good thing, since the level of resolution from stuttering is low. Only 6.3% of children who stutter no longer stutter 12 months after they began. Most children who stutter do so for longer than a year.

The cause of stuttering is mysterious. There appears to be an hereditary element, since stuttering sometimes runs in families. It can be a result of early brain injury, perhaps at birth. But also much stuttering is simply a result of having lots to say and not much skill in saying it. Preschoolers have big ideas but their ability to find the right words to express them is only just developing. It’s just hard to get it all out.

Parents of all small children – those who stutter and those who don’t (yet) – should follow these simple rules:

1. Be patient when your child speaks. Look her in the eye, give her your full attention, and listen calmly. Let your face be relaxed and unworried.
2. Avoid finishing your child’s sentences for him. Give him time to find the right words and to say what he wants to say.
3. Don’t correct your child’s speech. Little kids do mispronounce things or use the wrong words. But correcting your child’s speech makes her self-conscious and can contribute to over-thinking her words and make her stutter. If you feel you must guide your child, simply repeat what she said, using the correct form. If the child says, “I saw two mouses,” you can be appropriately amazed and say, “Really? You saw two mice? Where?”
4. Do not permit others to make a big deal over your child’s stuttering. This includes siblings, next-door neighbors, grandparents and preschool teachers. An accepting attitude is what will help your child most.
5. If stuttering persists, seems to really be getting in your child’s way or is upsetting to him, or if there is a history of stuttering that has persisted into adulthood among family members, then talk with a speech pathologist for advice.
6. Most of all, never, ever punish your child for stuttering, never reward your child for not stuttering, and never say something like, “I’ll listen to you when you can talk without stuttering.” Stuttering is not a bad habit your child can overcome if she just works at it. It’s not her fault.

If the causes of stuttering are mysterious, so are the reasons why stuttering goes away. Nothing you do will make it disappear, though things you do can make stuttering more likely or more difficult to overcome. As your child grows in his ability to use language, most likely his stuttering will evaporate.

As is often the case in child development, waiting – just waiting – is the very best response.

© 2013, Patricia Nan Anderson. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. Ask for Dr. Anderson’s new book, Developmentally Appropriate Parenting, at your favorite bookstore.

Now that school has started again, the usual comparison of children’s teachers begins too. Maybe you hoped your child would get a particular teacher this year and maybe you got your wish. But maybe you got another teacher, one who doesn’t come with a lot of recommendations. You might be wondering, how teachers are assigned to their classes.

Research has long demonstrated that schools that serve different populations of students get different sorts of teachers. But now a study in the Sociology of Education of the Miami-Dade school district shows that even within the same school, some teachers get better classes of students than others. Your own child’s classroom might have more or fewer of high-achieving students, well-behaved students, and students who are independent, creative learners.

Researcher Demetra Kalogrides reports that teachers who have more power – because of their years of experience in the school or their leadership roles – tend to be rewarded with “easier” classes of better students. At the same time, other teachers with less experience, who graduated from less-prestigious colleges, and teachers who were women, Hispanic or black, were more likely to be assigned lower-achieving students. These patterns were the same at both the elementary and secondary levels.

Previous studies have shown that high-quality teachers can significantly improve the success of the students they teach. In addition, it is more likely that new teachers assigned more difficult students may leave the teaching profession in frustration, leading to greater teacher turnover at the school and reducing overall teacher quality.

These trends may not be at play in your child’s school. The researchers found that schools with fewer experienced teachers and schools under a lot of pressure to show improvement are more likely to assign the best teachers to the most challenging classes. But what if you fear this trend is going on in your child’s school? What should you do if you think your child’s teacher isn’t so good as another teacher in the same grade?

1. Be visible to your child’s teacher. Be friendly but let her know you are paying attention. Children whose parents are engaged are more likely to get individualized help.
2. Be helpful. If you can, volunteer in your child’s classroom. Show up for parents’ night. Especially if your child’s teacher is new, she needs all the positive vibes you can send her way.
3. For many inexperienced teachers, the biggest problems are classroom management and discipline. If your child’s teacher seems especially unreasonable, coercive, or punitive, act quickly to bring this to the principal’s attention. No child should spend his days in a fearful situation.
4. If you have other questions or concerns, talk with the teacher first. Go to the principal with your worries only after you’ve discussed things with the teacher and no progress was made.
5. Be ready to fill in the gaps in your child’s education, by supporting learning at home, or, if things are really out of hand, even switching to another school.

Understand that assigning children to classrooms is an imperfect science and every great teacher once was a new teacher. Certainly young, vibrant teachers with new ideas can be more effective than more experienced but burned-out ones. So don’t jump to conclusions.

But as the school year gets underway, it’s time to get involved in your child’s education. No matter who your child’s teacher is, parent involvement is a key to school success.

© 2013, Patricia Nan Anderson. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. Ask for Dr. Anderson’s new book, Developmentally Appropriate Parenting, at your favorite bookstore.

Parents of premature and low-birth-weight babies know their children may lag behind other kids. They know their child’s chronological age is at odds with his developmental age – the newborn who is a month premature is a month younger, developmentally than other newborns – and they also know that this lag is persistent.

Premature and low-birth-weight babies (babies born at less than 32 weeks gestation or weighing less than 3lb 5oz) often have other health and neurological issues that put them behind their peers.

All this has meant that tiny babies grow up to struggle in school. Now there’s evidence that careful parenting can turn things around.

Researchers at the University of Warwick (England) studied the ways parents interacted with their six-year-olds who were “very premature” or very small at birth. They then measured these children’s school success later, at age 13.

They found that children of “highly sensitive parents” did very well in school. “Sensitive parenting” was defined as adjusting to fit the child’s behavior and responses, setting age-appropriate limits, and avoiding being overly permissive. In contrast, children whose parents were less-well attuned to them required more special education help and had more difficulty in school by age 13.

In addition, providing an intellectually stimulating environment, with interesting experiences, opportunities for creative thinking, and guidance in problem solving benefited both six-year-old children who were born premature/low-birth-weight and six-year-olds who were full-term babies.

Dieter Wolke of University of Warwick suggested “providing gentle feedback and suggesting potential solutions rather than taking over and solving the tasks for the child.” He says, “Cognitively stimulating parenting is where parents include activities designed to get children thinking such as reading to them or doing puzzles together.”

The factors identified as part of “sensitive parenting” and a stimulating environment are part of what has long been considered the ideal parenting style, good for all children.

What does this mean for us?

1. No matter how big your child was when she was born or how full-term she was, sensitive parenting makes sense and helps ensure your child’s success.
2. Even if you haven’t been a “highly sensitive” parent so far, there is still time. The children in this study were six when the study began. While we can assume their parents had been “sensitive” all along, starting to be more attuned to a child’s needs during elementary school should pay off.
3. As always, early intervention is better than intervening late. Don’t wait for problems to develop but be proactive. Give your child what he needs to develop well.

Everyone wants the best for his or her children. There’s a lot that parents can do to encourage good outcomes. This holds especially for the tiniest babies but it’s true for your baby too!

© 2013, Patricia Nan Anderson. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. Ask for Dr. Anderson’s new book, Developmentally Appropriate Parenting, at your favorite bookstore.

My sister visited from Kansas last week and we went through a box of old pictures, trying to identify relatives and ancestors. The photos in the box came right up to the start of the year 2000, but after that almost nothing. Recent photos live on our smart phones and computers. They aren’t available to be handled, sorted or even viewed in the same way the old photos are. Something is gained, but something, surely, is also lost.

These days, we don’t have to worry about getting the ‘right shot’ or about posing people for the one picture we’re taking. Without the limitations of film (do you even remember film cameras?) and the expense of photo processing, we’re free to take pictures all the time. And we do. It’s also easier these days to share photos – just an online posting or email will do it – so everyone can see our pictures.

But at the same time, there’s no box. There’s no scrapbook. There’s little chance to write a reminder of who is pictured, when the shot was taken and where. Instead of archival photos, these days we create what is known as “ephemera.” Our pictures are so numerous and so physically insubstantial that they have no individual importance. They don’t last.

They also are scattered. Some are on your computer, some on your phone, some on the digital camera, some – the ones somebody else took – only on Facebook. Some you’ve posted to Instagram or other sites. They’re everywhere. That means they’re nowhere. Your children and your children’s children won’t be able to look back as my sister and I did, contemplating the funny hairstyles and amazing living conditions of past lives.

An article by Heidi Glenn for National Public Radio offers some insight into this problem. She suggests that expanding technology will make it easier to embed information into photos themselves and that even face-recognition software might be applied to identify mystery pictures. But she also points out that technology depends on the continuation of the platform on which that technology works. Not every program or app at work today will endure even into the next decade.

So, what to do? Here are some suggestions.

1. Edit your photos. The ability to take unlimited numbers of photos means we’ve got an awful lot of awful pictures. Go ahead and delete the ones that you don’t want to keep forever.
2. Rename your photos with who, where and when. “Susan-Grandma G-2013-Hilton Head” will fill in the gaps in your memory years down the road.
3. Collect your photos into digital folders. You might organize your folders by year or by person. You might have special folders for big events. Folders make it more likely you’ll find the photo you want to locate.
4. House those folders in more than one location. You might house them on your computer but then make certain your computer is backed up, maybe by one of the low-cost automatic backup services. Or create a free website, using something like Google Sites, and share the website with other family members. Now you can add in not just names and dates but stories about what the pictures show. Be certain that you don’t rely exclusively on an online service that might go out of business someday in the future.
5. Make regular additions and updates. You don’t want your digital photo albums to be frozen in time. Make a date with yourself to add and update every month or so.

And, finally, digitize old paper photos you want to keep. According to NPR’s Heidi Glenn, future generations are unlikely to have a photo box like mine and my sister’s. Creating digital copies of those old photos will make them more shareable and will help to keep family history intact. That’s what my sister and I did while she was in town. We made digital copies of family photos from the early 1900s and shared them with our cousins.

Photos are the keepers of our family memories. Keep your family photos well!

© 2013, Patricia Nan Anderson. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. Ask for Dr. Anderson’s new book, Developmentally Appropriate Parenting, at your favorite bookstore.

Where are you when your child is on the monkey bars?

1. Rushing to get her down as fast as possible.
2. Warning her from the sidelines to be careful.
3. Watching without comment, ready to help if she gets into trouble.
4. Reading, checking your email, talking to friends.

Of course, every child is different and it makes a difference if the monkey-bar child is 18 months old or four. But the truth of the matter is this: children need challenges. A too-safe world keeps them small. In order to learn the limits of their abilities and to expand those abilities, kids have to push the edges of their known worlds into new worlds of mastery.

Playgrounds, in particular, can be too safe, not so much because they present no challenge but because parents don’t permit children to go into danger. I’m a fan of that rubber mulch that lets a child bounce a bit when he falls. But that mulch is there because falls are expected. Removing all chance of falling by insisting a child say close to the ground or by insisting he hold your hand doesn’t keep a child safe as much as it limits his development.

Former New York City parks commissioner Henry Stern puts it this way: “I grew up on the monkey bars in Fort Tryon Park, and I never forgot how good it felt to get to the top of them. I didn’t want to see that playground bowdlerized. I said that as long as I was parks commissioner, those monkey bars were going to stay.”

A study of children’s risky play found that risk tends to come in six varieties: climbing high, going fast, handling dangerous objects, being near dangerous phenomena (like fire or water), wrestling and other combat, and being away from adults. Researchers found that children manage their own level of challenge with these risks, going a bit further with risk each time, but regulating the danger themselves. Lead author of the study, Ellen Sandseter, says, “The best thing is to let children encounter these challenges from an early age, and they will then progressively learn to master them through their play over the years.”

In addition, there is no evidence that “safer” playgrounds, with lower structures and softer surfaces, have reduced injuries. Risk management professor David Ball reports that some injuries, including arm fractures, actually increased when softer surfaces were introduced. He explains this by saying that “safe” playgrounds actually disguise risks so that children are less able to regulate the level of challenge and get into trouble.

As every parent knows, a trip to the playground is no fun if there’s no challenge. The experience quickly becomes boring. So what can you do?

• Keep quiet. Don’t warn, shout, or forbid.
• Play the role of spotter. If you need to, stand under, ready to catch a fall or help the child who thinks he’s gone as far as he can go. If you can, stand a bit further back.
• Teach how to self-rescue. Help the child who is stuck in the middle of the monkey bars with arms giving out to notice that her feet are a lot closer to the ground than her eyes are. Teach how to let go and land safely.
• Don’t over-sympathize. Yes, that was a nasty fall. But if it’s not a big deal, don’t make it into a big deal.
• Bring Band-Aids. Many kids think every scratch needs covering. If this is your child, then just bring a supply of Band-Aids and let the child apply them if he thinks he needs to. Again, don’t over sympathize.
• Don’t insist the big kids play where the little kids play. It’s hard when you’re supervising a toddler and a kindergartener. But insisting that the kindergartener play on the baby equipment limits the older child’s learning and actually endangers everyone as he looks for ways to insert challenge into a tame situation. Try to keep everyone in view but not necessarily in the same space.

We all know how important it is that children be active and play outside. Make certain that your children’s outdoor play stimulates not only their muscles but also their brains. Let them stretch their abilities by making certain not everything is always safe.

© 2013, Patricia Nan Anderson. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. Ask for Dr. Anderson’s new book, Developmentally Appropriate Parenting, at your favorite bookstore.

How do babies learn to be careful at the edge of a dropoff? It’s not that they learn when they fall. Babies learn to be afraid of heights even without the experience of falling.

Instead, it appears that babies learn to be cautious just by moving around. Babies too young to crawl learned to avoid drop-offs when they used a go-cart-type device that gave them experience with motion.

Up to about 9 months old, babies seem unconcerned about falling. Every parent knows that unattended infants readily roll off beds or changing tables or tumble down stairs. They seem oblivious to the danger heights pose.

But as soon as a child is able to crawl, she gets more cautious. Joseph Campos, researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, has done a lot of study on this change of perspective. For example, he has found that at about this age, babies pick up cues from trusted adults about unfamiliar situations, including the situation of encountering a dropoff.

In a recent study, published this month in Psychological Science, Campos led a team in understanding if children’s ability to get around helps in developing a fear of heights. The research team gave some babies who hadn’t yet learned to crawl – and who therefore were still unconcerned about heights – experience with a riding toy that permitted them to get around on their own. These go-cart babies quickly became worried whenever they came to an edge, as indicated by increased heart rate. Babies without the go-cart experience showed no anxiety about visual cliffs.

According to Campos, this finding is important because it means the ability to judge the danger of a dropoff doesn’t develop just by growing older. It’s not a maturational thing. Instead, it depends on experience.

For us parents, the take-home message is this: children need experiences. They need to move around and do things. And children who have a disability that limits their mobility or who are restricted in what they’re allowed to do in order to keep them “safe” or out of the way may be delayed in key cognitive accomplishments.

If just being able to move around is so important, what else matters too? It’s important to let kids be kids.

© 2013, Patricia Nan Anderson. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. Ask for Dr. Anderson’s new book, Developmentally Appropriate Parenting, at your favorite bookstore.

Parents of boys who want to play football are well aware of the dangers. As Dr. Pietro Tonino of Loyola University Medical Center in Chicago says, “When you have two human beings collide at a high rate of speed — especially if one of them is much bigger than the other — then significant injuries are quite possible.”

But now that football practices are in full swing across the country, and as teams are prepping for the first games of the season, it’s important to be aware of the risks, not only inherent in the game itself but in attention to safety across the board.

A study published a decade ago in the journal Pediatrics found that children who play baseball are about as much at risk for injury as children who play football. But only 3% of baseball injuries were serious while nearly five times as many football injuries (14%) involved fractures, dislocations, and concussions. Yes, all sports are dangerous. But some are more dangerous than others.

The most common football injuries results in damage to knees, ankles, shoulders, and backs. Concussions, though less common, are more serious for children than they are for adult players. Not only are children more likely than adults to suffer concussions but it takes them longer to heal than it takes adults and the damage may impair brain development – development that continues through late adolescence into the early 20s.

Tonino advises parents to pay close attention to practices as well as to what goes on in games. Tonino’s study published in Physician and Sports Medicine reported that high school football games typically have inadequate medical staffing. Only 10% of Chicago high school games have a physician on the sidelines and only 8.5% had even an athletic trainer, though 89% had a paramedic available (usually in a parked ambulance). But even though supervision at games was lacking, supervision at practices was even less. Tonino found that no school had a physician or paramedic present during practices and only one had an athletic trainer.

Parents who do let their children play football should watch for these things, at practices as well as at games:

• Understand the risk of heat stroke. During summer training camp, insist that practices be held in early morning or early evening;
• Keep an eye out for concussions. Get immediate medical attention if your child “has his bell rung” at practice or in a game. Do not toss this off as just part of the sport.
• Attend a practice. Is there adequate water and ice for players? How are players treated by the coaches?
• During games, is there a physician or athletic trainer on the sidelines?
• During practices, coaches often are the only ones who provide medical supervision. Do you trust your child’s coach to pay attention to children’s health and safety or is he only interested in winning games?

Tonino says, “I don’t believe it is worth the risk. So I advise parents to try to steer their children to alternative sports. We are just beginning to understand the long-term consequences of injuries sustained at young ages.”

If you decide to let your child play, play it smart. Don’t jeopardize his health, his future and maybe even his life by keeping quiet when you should speak up.

© 2013, Patricia Nan Anderson. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. Ask for Dr. Anderson’s new book, Developmentally Appropriate Parenting, at your favorite bookstore.

Of course your friends and family want to see your child in your Facebook posts and on other social media sites. But it’s easy to cross the line between sharing your child’s life and exposing his life unfairly or even using his lives as part of some sort of exhibition. There are reasons why social media restrict users to people over the age of 13. One of those reasons is to keep kids from being exploited, even by their parents.

A five-year-old is an Instagram sensation because of his fashion-conscious clothes. Surely this boy doesn’t choose these duds himself. He also doesn’t photograph himself in precociously sophisticated poses. The New York Magazine article that discusses this child’s social media fame reports “There are now five fan accounts dedicated to his style, two of which have appeared in the last month.” Other children didn’t create these fan pages. Adults did. Only adults are responsible for creating this boy’s alter ego and for publicizing his exploits for their own purposes.

Of course, your little posts don’t go to such extremes. But this child’s story is just one of a long line of cautionary tales. Christopher Milne, whose father wrote the Winnie-the-Pooh books describing his childhood exploits, spoke of feeling that his childhood was stolen from him. He wrote, “It seemed to me almost that my father had got where he was by climbing on my infant shoulders, that he had filched from me my good name and left me nothing but empty fame.”

Children should not be the foundation of a parent’s next career. Parents who create a role for themselves by thrusting their child into the limelight steal their child’s potential. It’s obvious to us that this happened to Christopher Robin. It’s part of the horrifying fun of watching shows like Dance Moms and Toddlers in Tiaras. And maybe it’s clear to us that’s what’s happening in the family of the five-year-old fashion star.

But it’s not always obvious when we’re posting to Facebook or Flickr or other sites. The Internet has a long memory. Images and commentary never really go away. You can take things down but they already exist somewhere else, if other people have copied or shared or even just “liked” your post. So have a care:

1. If your motive in making a post is to expose or embarrass your child – or if it could have that effect someday down the road – then don’t make that post.

2. If your motive in making a post is to demonstrate what a good parent you are by using your child as an example or object lesson – then don’t make that post.

3. If your motive in making a post is in any way to make money from your child – by using her face on your book cover or by repeating her cute sayings or whatever – then don’t make that post.

Your child is a star, of course. She’s a wonderful person with a marvelous future and because she’s your child there’s a bit of pride and glory that shines onto you. That’s lovely. But don’t exploit your child in an effort to capitalize on her in any way. She is your child but you don’t own her.

Only children own children’s lives and it’s up to them to decide, when they’re old enough to make such decisions, what parts of their lives they want to share. No child should be a social media star. It’s a parent’s job to make certain this is so.

© 2013, Patricia Nan Anderson. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. Ask for Dr. Anderson’s new book, Developmentally Appropriate Parenting, at your favorite bookstore.

Everyone knows that grownups “eat with their eyes.” A prettily arranged plate, with a nice arrangement of foods and colors, makes everything look delicious. Restaurants go to great pains to make food look attractive.

Now we know that visually interesting food is important to children too. Making food look nice on the plate may be the secret to getting children to eat what’s good for them.

In a recent study at Iowa State University, elementary-grade children at a summer camp were presented in the cafeteria line with a digital sign featuring a rotating image of a salad. Imagine something along the lines of a typical fast-food restaurant burger promotion, but with attractive pictures of lettuce and other vegetables. Cafeteria choices included salad, of course, but also the usual sorts of kid entrees, like tacos, sloppy joes, and other favorites.

Cafeteria workers weighed the salad ingredients before and after the lunch period. They found that after the installation of the digital promotion of salad, that more salad was taken and less was left to be discarded from the salad bar at the end of the lunch. In fact, researchers found that boys were 50 to 70 percent more likely to serve themselves lettuce, cucumbers, tomatoes and carrots after the sign was installed than before.

According to the lead scientist, “You respond to the image on the display like you would respond to a plate in front of you. If you’re hungry you respond by saying, ‘I’ll have what’s in that picture.’”

Certainly, parents of children who are reluctant to eat their vegetables don’t need to install a video player in the dining room to loop images of lettuce in advance of every meal. But maybe we all could take a bit more care in presenting food attractively. Here are some salad presentation ideas.

1. Set up a mini salad bar with a couple different lettuces, some tomatoes or shredded carrots, sliced snap peas and other goodies. Offer an orange-juice-based dressing or even no dressing at all.

2. Use salad plates or little bowls or even dishes ordinarily reserved for ice cream.

3. Serve salad in taco shells, soft tortillas, or in bread bowls.

4. Make a bit of dining room theater out of tossing a salad in a big wooden bowl and scooping it out into individual salad bowls.

5. Garnish a “composed” salad – one you arrange on plates in the kitchen, like they do in restaurants – with intriguing extras. Add a curl of bacon one time, edible flowers another time (chemical-free nasturtiums, garden violets and even rose petals are possibilities), fruit, carrot curls or fish-cracker croutons whenever you feel like it.

6. Try making a layered salad by building it in a glass dish so the layers are visible.

7. Get kids involved in creating pretty salads and see what happens.

Just being aware of the way food looks can go a long way towards getting it eaten. One can’t make a big deal over vegetables every day, perhaps, but even once in a while can get children to take a taste once in a while.

© 2013, Patricia Nan Anderson. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. Ask for Dr. Anderson’s new book, Developmentally Appropriate Parenting, at your favorite bookstore.