Music important to child development | KXAN.com

Music important to child development | KXAN.com: Youngblood said music, as a daily routine, supports all learning styles and supports family bonding. Adults do not need any special skills or talent when singing with their child.

Some ways that parents/caregivers can start today to make music a part of their daily routine is:

Too Much TV May Make Kids Antisocial, Study Suggests - US News and World Report

Too Much TV May Make Kids Antisocial, Study Suggests - US News and World Report: Five-year-olds who watch television for three or more hours a day are a bit more likely to fight, steal and have other antisocial behaviors by the age of 7, a new study suggests.

- The Future of Children -

 - The Future of Children -: The Role of Selection
A common challenge in research in this area is that parents who are single or cohabiting may have attributes (both observed and unobserved) that differ from those of married parents and that also foster adverse child and adolescent outcomes. Men who choose to cohabit, for example, may not have the same family values that men who choose to marry do. As a consequence of such attributes, the negative "effects" being ascribed to single parenthood and cohabitation may be explained by the pre-existing attributes of members of these families, rather than reflecting an effect of the family type. Although some of these differing attributes can be controlled for using survey data on characteristics such as age and education, other differences may be harder to measure even in a detailed study such as FFCWS. A parental characteristic such as a lack of strong family values is hard to observe in survey data but it may be at work within the family system, simultaneously influencing both the structure of the family and child well-being.

- The Future of Children -

 - The Future of Children -: Marcia Carlson and Sara McLanahan find that by age five, nearly two-fifths of children of unwed parents had no regular contact with their fathers in the past two years, while another two-fifths were seeing their father on a regular basis (the remaining one-fifth fell somewhere in between).17 Having a father who is actively involved in the child's upbringing even though he is not residing in the household could yield numerous benefits in terms of child health and development. Nonresident father involvement might also benefit children by raising the quality of mothers' parenting. Nonresident father involvement could also, however, be detrimental if fathers acted in ways that interfered with child health and development or if poor relationship quality between the father and mother led to lower-quality parenting behaviors on her part.

- The Future of Children -

 - The Future of Children -: Parental mental health is also an important influence on child well-being, and one that differs across family types. Single mothers report more depression and psychological problems than married mothers and undoubtedly function less well as parents as a result.9 Cohabiting mothers have also been found to suffer more from depression than married mothers, which again would directly interfere with their ability to display good parenting skills.10 It is important to note that these differences may be the result of these mothers' living situation or may reflect pre-existing differences between the types of women who have children out of wedlock rather than in marriage (as we discuss in the section on selection below).11

- The Future of Children -

 - The Future of Children -: Single parenthood and cohabitation have lost much of their stigma as their prevalence has increased. But there are still many reasons to be concerned about the well-being of children in fragile families, and, indeed, research overwhelmingly concludes that they fare worse than children born into married-couple households.4 What remains unclear is how large the effects of single parenthood and cohabitation are in early childhood and what specific aspects of life in fragile families explain those effects.

Want to improve your financial net worth? Get married | Deseret News

Want to improve your financial net worth? Get married | Deseret News: "I was running around and having a good time," he says. "Then, one day, you wake up. You think, 'Enough of this nonsense. I don't want to wake up alone. I want someone in the house with me.’ ”

Freed, who is the owner of a financial services consulting firm in North Bergen, N.J., married in 1994. He discovered that marriage was about more than love and companionship — it also helped his financial net worth.

'Free play' is vital to children's healthy development, psychologist says

'Free play' is vital to children's healthy development, psychologist says: The importance of play—crucial for children's healthy psychological development and ability to thrive in life—is woefully underestimated by parents and educators, according to Peter Gray, a Boston College developmental psychologist and author of the new book Free to Learn: Why Unleashing the Instinct to Play Will Make Our Children Happier, More Self-Reliant, and Better Students for Life.