WSJ: School Closures Damage the Youngest Children

My most recent op-ed in the Wall Street Journal:

In the contentious debate over opening schools, there is almost no mention of the youngest learners—children 2 to 5, who attend day care, nursery schools or prekindergarten programs. That’s a terrible omission. What those children need to accomplish can’t be done in isolation or in front of a laptop, and it has to be done during a brief developmental window that closes around age 5 and never opens again.

The learning needs of the youngest students in pre-K programs are easy to underestimate, because their schoolwork...

Read More.
Reading in The Screen Age
I recently came across a 2014 Jessica Potts Lahey interview with Stephen King where they discussed absorbing the "grammatical principles of one's native language." He said, "Reading is the key, though. A kid who grows up hearing, "It don't matter to me" can only learn doesn't if he/she reads it over and over again." I don't know why this struck me so forcefully. Perhaps because I've been spending a lot of time in nursery school classrooms doing research for a new book on parenting preschoolers. Very young children are so eager to be read to and yet they're being raised in the Screen Age... Read More.