"Computer Coding: It's Not Just for Boys"

Special Report: The Female Factor

Computer Coding: It's Not Just for Boys

By BETH GARDINER

Published: March 7, 2013

LONDON — At 16, Isabelle Aleksander spends hours writing computer code and plans a career in engineering. Her latest passion is the Raspberry Pi, a low-cost, credit-card-size computer developed to help teach programming.

But when she told her best friend — “he’s male, also into programming” — his response was not what she had expected. “He was like, ‘Wait, how do you know about them? You’re a girl and you shouldn’t be doing that,”’ Ms. Aleksander said incredulously.

She and her friend Honey Ross, 15, are among the few girls at King Alfred School, their private school in North London, with an intense interest in technology. The two, confident and outgoing, say they understand why: computing can seem boring from the outside, populated mainly by nerdy boys.

“It’s sad,” Ms. Ross said, chatting between classes in the computer lab. “It’s such an amazing world. It’s kind of waiting for loads of young girls” to jump in.

Belinda Parmar would love to see that happen, particularly since current statistics suggest that women in technology, already a relative rarity, are about to get even scarcer.

Three years ago, Ms. Parmar founded Lady Geek, a consulting firm that helps technology companies connect with female customers and bolster the number of women in work forces. Convinced that the paucity of women in technology has its roots in earlier life, Ms. Parmar last fall started Little Miss Geek, a non-profit aimed at convincing girls that programming is not a solitary grind but creative and eventually lucrative work.

Both sexes love gadgets — but while girls may enjoy owning the latest devices, parents and teachers do not point out that they also have the brains to build them, Ms. Parmar says.

“They’re dreaming of using the iPad mini and the latest smartphone, but they’re not dreaming of creating it,” she said.

As a consequence, Ms. Parmar said, women are missing out in an industry that is changing the world and growing and paying handsomely, as other sectors shrink.

Britain’s technology sector is 20 percent female, according to Eurostat, the E.U. statistics agency; Ms. Parmar cites a figure of 17 percent. Neither is far off the E.U. average of 21.8 percent, or the U.S. rate of 24 percent of technology jobs held by women, down from 36 percent in 1991, according to the National Center for Women & Information Technology, at the University of Colorado in Boulder.

The future looks bleak. Girls take just 8 percent of Britain’s computer science A-levels, the high school exam that is the passport to university studies, Little Miss Geek reports. In the United States, girls are 19 percent of high school Advanced Placement test-takers in the field, the Colorado center says.

Ms. Parmar traces the problem at least partly to technology’s image. When her team asked children to draw a person who worked in technology, all sketched men, often geeky and disheveled.

That brainy-guys-in-the-garage stereotype is hardly helped by companies that Ms. Parmar believes condescend to female customers with pink devices, and offend them with bikini-clad models at technology shows. “The technology industry is 30 years behind the car industry” in interaction with women, she said.

If they do enroll in computer classes, pre-adolescent and teenage girls often find they are the only girls in the room.

“Even girls that are doing well at math, they opt out. They just want to belong,” said Marina Larios, president of the European Association for Women in Science, Engineering & Technology.

Messages about gender and technology tend to start in earliest childhood, when boys are encouraged to play computer games and think about how things work, while girls get toy makeup and fashion sets, Ms. Parmar said.

Catherine Ashcraft, senior research scientist at the Colorado center, said:

“It appears on the surface that women aren’t choosing” technology, but “there are a lot of factors that are influencing that choice.” She continued: “Girls talk about how even when there’s a computer in the house, they don’t get access to it as much, because the boys are pushing them away.”

Subtle, even unconscious bias can prompt parents, teachers and guidance counselors to give the sexes different study and career advice, she said.

Exercise May Help Protect Children From Stress

By JAN HOFFMAN

Hélène Desplechi/Getty Images

Physically active children generally report happier moods and fewer symptoms of depression than children who are less active. Now researchers may have found a reason: by one measure, exercise seems to help children cope with stress.
Finnish researchers had 258 8-year-old boys and girls wear accelerometers on their wrists for at least four days that registered the quality and quantity of their physical activity. Their parents used cotton swabs to take saliva samples at various times throughout a single day, which the researchers used to assess levels of cortisol, a hormone typically induced by physical or mental stress.
There was no difference in the cortisol levels at home between children who were active and those who were less active. But when the researchers gave the children a standard psychosocial stress test at a clinic involving arithmetic and storytelling challenges, they found that those who had not engaged in physical activity had raised cortisol levels. The children who had moderate or vigorous physical activity showed relatively no rise in cortisol levels.
Those results indicate a more positive physiological response to stress by children who were more active, the researchers said in a study that was published this week in The Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism. The children who were least active had the highest levels.
“This study shows that children who are more active throughout their day have a better hormonal response to an acute stressful situation,” said Disa Hatfield, an assistant professor of kinesiology at the University of Rhode Island, who was not involved in the study.

Dr. Hatfield noted that the study did not control for sugar intake, which has also been associated with higher levels of cortisol. And as the researchers themselves noted, the wrist-born accelerometers could not accurately measure certain activities like bicycling or swimming.
Michael F. Bergeron, a professor of pediatrics at the University of South Dakota and executive director of the National Youth Sports Health and Safety Institute, cautioned that chronic levels of cortisol might be a better measurement of a child’s propensity toward stress, rather than the single-day measurements taken in the new study.
“A single response to a single stressor may be what the body needs to do, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing,” he said.
Although elementary schools in the last decade have generally been supportive of physical education, only 29 percent of high school students meet the national guideline of 60 minutes a day, said Russell R. Pate, a professor of exercise science at the University of South Carolina, who has worked on national studies of fitness levels in students.
“It’s not a huge surprise that kids who are encouraged to be more active would be more relaxed,” he said.
In a school, a child who gets more activity on a daily basis, Dr. Hatfield said, will respond better to everyday stressors like tests and social challenges. “The study suggests the physiological reason: it may be because their hormonal response is different,” she said.

"109 Ways to Celebrate Math Lessons from Dr. Seuss"

109 Ways to Celebrate Math Lessons From Dr. Seuss

Posted: 03/02/2013 9:00 am

Dr. Seuss , Green Eggs And Ham , Red Fish Blue Fish , Creativity , Dr. Seuss , Mathematics , Theodor Seuss Geisel , Books News

Many fans of multiple generations will honor Theodor Seuss Geisel's (Dr. Seuss) birthday this weekend with celebrations of his monumental contributions to reading. Scholastic magazine offers lesson plans to teachers on how to toast the author with classroom reading and art projects.
But Dr. Seuss books also convey important messages about mathematics. The late, beloved author, who would have turned 109 today, reminds us of the importance of exploring patterns, thinking creatively, and developing our ability with language as we learn mathematics.
"One, fish, two fish, red fish, blue fish."
Relationships between objects is a theme in many of Dr. Seuss' books. You can sort fish by whether they are red or blue, or sad or glad. You can compare "his and her feet" with "fuzzy fur feet." This goal of identifying patterns is central to mathematical learning. From sorting blocks to working with functions, patterns are pervasive in the work of mathematics. In fact, for over two decades mathematics has been referred to as the science of patterns. The central idea is that doing mathematics involves exploring the arrangements of structures, and across grade levels students should be engaged in identifying, representing and describing patterns.
"I do not like green eggs and ham."
In his iconic story of Sam I Am, no amount of pestering will initially convince the main character to taste the atypical green eggs and ham. Unfortunately, many students treat mathematics learning in a similar way, viewing math as progression of algorithms to be memorized, with no detours allowed. They do not want to try a different approach (even in a box or with a fox!).
Yet being open to trying alternative methods in mathematics, and to finding multiple and creative solutions to tasks is a valuable mathematical skill. A 2013 study conducted in Cyprus documented the positive correlation between student creativity in mathematics and student mathematical achievement. Promoting our students' mathematical creativity is an important avenue for advancing their understanding of mathematics.
"There's a wocket in my pocket."
A bofa on the sofa? A zeller in the cellar? Dr. Seuss plays with words -- giving them new meaning and inventing new words. Similar issues with language are key in learning mathematics. Many words have different meanings in everyday language than in a mathematical context -- take "straight," "even," or "factor," for example. And this is not just an issue in K-12 mathematics.
A 2013 study at the University of Texas Arlington reports on challenges college students face understanding "if" and "or" from a mathematical perspective, rather than a colloquial sense. Learning mathematics involves teasing apart these differences as well as learning new words and terminology.
Dr. Seuss is credited with saying, "It is better to know how to learn than to know." This is to me, the essential goal of mathematics learning -- to understand mathematics to such a degree that you have the disposition and the tools to figure out the task at hand, or at least to make some progress. Fluency with procedures is certainly important, but without the drive to seek out answers to questions we don't know, little progress can be made in mathematics.
An innovator in many ways -- from his use of text to the illustrations he created -- Dr. Seuss opened up new worlds for children and adults. While his primary contributions may very well be in the world of reading, his books offer important lessons for mathematics learning as well.
Last week the results of the 2011 National Assessment of Educational Progress were reported with good news for mathematics -- students in grades 4 and 8 scored higher in mathematics than previously, with substantial increases over the past 10 years. We're moving in the right direction. Let's keep going as educators, parents and lifelong learners, and remember the lessons from Dr. Seuss: "Oh the thinks you can think up if only you try."

"The Allergy Buster: Can a Radical New Treatment Save Children with Severe Food Allergies?"

The Allergy Buster

Can a Radical New Treatment Save Children With Severe Food Allergies?

Art Streiber for The New York Times

Dr. Kari Nadeau, who is conducting a trial to desensitize children with multiple food allergies, with some of her patients.

By MELANIE THERNSTROM

Published: March 7, 2013

For nine years, the greatest challenge Kim Yates Grosso faced each day was keeping her daughter Tessa safe. Tessa was so severely allergic to milk, wheat, eggs, nuts, shellfish and assorted other foods that as a toddler she went into anaphylactic shock when milk fell on her skin. Kim never left her with a baby sitter. She slept with her each night. And when she needed to work, she found a job she could do primarily from home in the evenings. She successfully lobbied the Menlo Park, Calif., school district to provide Tessa with a full-time aide (in accordance with the Americans With Disabilities Act) to shadow her at all times. She made all of Tessa’s food from scratch, including safe treats to bring to birthday parties, when she could persuade her daughter to attend them at all. Tessa never spent the night at a friend’s house — she didn’t feel comfortable sleeping in an unsafe environment.

Originally Kim insisted the whole family eat only the foods Tessa could, but then she realized it wasn’t fair for her younger daughters not to be able to eat like other kids at school and birthday parties. Suppose you couldn’t walk, Kim said, explaining her thinking to Tessa; should I make your sisters sit in wheelchairs too? Kim herself kept to Tessa’s diet, however — Tessa never saw her mother so much as add milk to her tea.

Yet this carefully constructed world was in constant danger of collapse. In 2011, Tessa almost died twice. First, when she was 7, a piece of rye toast turned out to contain traces of wheat. Then, 10 months later, Kim took a small uncharacteristic break from their rigid food routine and bought some Vietnamese summer rolls from a restaurant after quizzing the staff about each of the ingredients. But the clear noodles that she was told were rice turned out to be made of wheat, and soon Tessa was losing consciousness. She didn’t have hives or other external signs parents often rely upon, but internally her body shut down. At her doctor’s office, the medical team had to use two EpiPens, adrenaline-loaded syringes, along with steroids and an array of drugs to bring her back. (Injected adrenaline is the only known antidote with the power to arrest anaphylactic shock, the allergic-immune response that causes tissues throughout the body to swell until the windpipe closes, the lungs collapse and the heart fails.)

A week later Tessa began having panic attacks. She no longer wanted to leave the house without her mother — even to go to school or diving practice. She was afraid to eat. “Her belief was, If I don’t eat, I can’t die,” Kim recalled in one of our many conversations over the last year. When Kim went away for the weekend, she returned to discover her daughter had eaten only one bowl of plain white rice in 48 hours. At school Tessa didn’t want to touch anybody or anything. What if at recess the kickball had rolled through a splash of milk or some bread crumbs in the courtyard where kids ate their lunches? Costly sessions with a child psychiatrist were of limited value. Treatment for obsessive-compulsive disorders like germ phobia teaches the sufferer to distinguish anxiety from reality, but the reality for a severely allergic child is that invisible trace contaminants can kill.

"Books for Women's History Month and More"

Books for Women's History Month and More

Our top kids' book picks for March celebrate Women's History Month, smart kids, and outsider teen romance.

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	Senior Editor, Books \| Mom of two

Finding the right book for your kid can be a challenge. But if you guess right and keep new ones coming, you may be on your way to raising a lifelong reader.
Every month, we highlight a few books for different ages -- some exceptional titles that could be the perfect thing to perk your kid's interest, get your reader hooked on a new author, or rediscover an old favorite. Here are our picks for March:

For kids 5 to 9, there's Who Says Women Can't Be Doctors?: The Story of Elizabeth Blackwell, written by Tanya Lee Stone and illustrated by Marjorie Priceman. This lively picture book bio shows what it was like to grow up in the 1830s, when girls wore long dresses and bonnets and weren't expected to have careers. It also shows the courage and determination of a young woman who's sure she's as smart and capable as any man and goes on to become America's first female doctor. It's a great choice for Women's History Month and wonderful for encouraging girls to study science and be whatever they want to be.
For readers 8 to 12, Kathryn Fitzmaurice's Destiny, Rewritten offers a bright tween heroine on a mission to find out the identity of her dad. Living in in Berkeley, Calif., with her English professor single mom, Emily learns that a missing book holds the answer about her father and enlists her smart friends to help her find it. Along the way, they encounter homeless people, tree-sitting protesters, and assorted local oddballs. This utterly charming middle-grade novel celebrates kids' resourcefulness, brainpower, and friendship.
For teens 14 to 17, Eleanor & Park by Rainbow Rowell is a coming-of-age romance about two Omaha high school misfits in the 1980s who meet and fall in love on the school bus. Eleanor is an intelligent but often ridiculed girl from a poor, broken family; Park is a sensitive half-Korean guy whose parents are still in love with each other. Every day, the two share comics, music, and eventually a deep friendship that grows into a profound first love. Witty dialogue and pitch-perfect descriptions of teen life in the mid-'80s make this first YA novel from adult author Rowell a great choice teens -- and their moms.
For more suggestions, check out our "top picks" lists, including Award-Winning Books, Books Like The Hunger Games, and our reviews of the latest chart-toppers on the New York Times Best-Sellers list.

"Creativity Requires a Mix of Skills"

Creativity Requires a Mix of Skills

Bryan Goodwin and Kirsten Miller

Albert Einstein was so slow to learn to speak that his worried parents consulted a specialist. Thomas Edison was told by a teacher that he had a "disarranged mind." And Charles Darwin was considered, by his family and teachers alike, "rather below the common standard of intellect."
What was it about these three children that led some people to consider them unpromising, when they would go on to accomplish great things? It's safe to say that Einstein, Edison, and Darwin each had a way of thinking that was different from that of their peers. They inarguably possessed some of the most creative minds in contemporary history.

Although most of us tend to recognize creativity when we see it, from a research perspective, it tends to be an amorphous construct defined in a variety of ways, such as divergent thinking, heuristic problem-solving, and right-brained thinking. As Livne and Milgram (2006) note, however, there is a "lack of serious empirical evidence demonstrating the construct validity of proposed theories" of creativity (p. 206). Lack of rigorous research or precise definitions notwithstanding, popular authors, among them Sir Ken Robinson (2011) and Daniel Pink (2005), have argued that just because we cannot measure creativity on a standardized achievement test, that doesn't mean we should ignore it.

Creativity and the Economy

In A Whole New Mind, Pink (2005) popularized the argument that in today's global economy, the marketplace will increasingly reward creativity more than knowledge alone. The economy, he writes, has shifted from one in which most workers needed left-brain knowledge of details and step-by-step procedures to one that demands right-brain creativity—the ability to synthesize knowledge and develop inventive solutions to complex challenges.
For example, according to an analysis of U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data conducted by the international business research and consulting firm McKinsey and Company, only 30 percent of new jobs created in the United States between 1998 and 2004 were of the routine, algorithmic variety, whereas 70 percent involve complex, heuristic work (Bradford, Manyika, & Yee, 2005) in which employees interact with other employees and customers and make complex decisions requiring knowledge, judgment, experience, and instinct.
If there is a growing need for creativity in the workplace, what can teachers do to help students become more creative? Inside the square box of the classroom, how can we help students think outside the box?

Defining Creativity

The first step to teaching creativity lies in understanding and defining it. Fortunately, decades of research have explored the nature of creativity.
More than 60 years ago, J. P. Guilford (1950) first proposed the idea that divergent thinking—the process of producing multiple answers from the information at hand—is inherently linked to creativity. Since then, so much has been made of this idea that the terms divergent thinking and creativity are often presented as synonymous.
Research suggests, however, that creativity is at least a two-part process. Creative thinking, according to Cropley (2006), appears to require both convergent thinking—which focuses on speed, accuracy, and logic—and divergent thinking—which uses information in unexpected ways to produce alternate or multiple answers to a problem. Finke, Ward, and Smith (1992) identified creativity as both generative and exploratory. During the generative phase, we identify creative or alternate solutions to a problem; during the exploratory phase, we evaluate these solutions and select the best option (Kaufman & Sternberg, 2007).
In short, creativity appears to require a yin and a yang: It involves both novelty (creating new ideas and solutions) and analysis (to explore the novelty's potential effectiveness) (Cropley, 2006). Creativity requires bouncing an idea back and forth between left- and right-brain thinking; stepping back to analyze what we've created, and if necessary, tearing it up. That's why the creative process typically entails drafting and redrafting, sketching and painting over, and at times starting all over again. However, we cannot allow left-brain thinking to dominate the process, preemptively quashing our divergent thinking, leaving us with only wads of paper on the floor.

Schooling That Suppresses Creativity

In 1968, George Land administered a creativity test to 1,600 five-year-olds (Land & Jarman, 1992). The test, which he had developed for NASA to identify innovative scientists and engineers, found that 98 percent of tested children registered at a genius level on the creative scale. But five years later, when Land readministered the test to the now-10-year-old children, only 30 percent of them scored at the genius level of creativity. After another five years, the number dropped to just 12 percent. The same test, administered to 280,000 adults, found that only 2 percent registered at the genius level for creativity. Land concluded that noncreative thinking is learned.
Research suggests that instruction in U.S. classrooms has tended to skew toward teaching routine tasks that follow a step-by-step process, rather than encouraging complex and creative problem-solving. Researchers who compared hours of video of U.S. teachers in the classroom with footage of teachers in classrooms in other countries found that U.S. teachers commonly downgrade complex, heuristic-type problems into simplistic, algorithmic tasks (Stigler & Hiebert, 2004). For example, teachers might turn a problem that could be creatively challenging, such as figuring out how to calculate the area of a triangle, into a procedural chore by giving students the formula for solving the problem (1/2 base × height) and directing them to plug in the numbers.

What Schools Need to Do

To help students gain (or regain) their ability to combine convergent and divergent thinking, educators may need to teach and model how to solve complex problems—such as developing a formula to predict a factory's product costs as its output increases or researching and writing about how World War I might have been avoided. These strategies might include breaking problems down into smaller problems, looking for ways that the new problem is similar to others students may have solved in the past, and brainstorming possible solutions for the problem with their peers (Ormrod, 2008).
The late E. Paul Torrance, who devoted his career to creativity research, recommended using "what if" questions to foster creative thinking. For example, rather than asking a student, "In what year did Columbus discover America?" a teacher could ask, "If Columbus had landed in California, how would our lives be different?" The latter question requires students to draw on creative thinking skills such as "imagining, experimenting, discovering, elaborating, testing solutions, and communicating discoveries" (Torrance & Goff, 1990, p. 2).
Schools should also resist the temptation to view creative-thinking skills and content knowledge as an either-or proposition. As Carson (2007) points out, some problem-solving advocates have downgraded the importance of the content knowledge itself and instead champion teaching students generic critical-thinking skills that they can apply to any content. In reality, however, creativity should not be taught at the expense of content. A study of 1,000 high school students, for example, found no link between students' creative problem-solving abilities and their math skills (Livne & Milgram, 2006, p. 199). It would appear then that being creative doesn't automatically make students smarter, nor does being smarter make students more creative: We must develop both content knowledge and creative-thinking abilities.
Just as songwriters must understand chords and scales and writers must know spelling and grammar conventions, students are likely to benefit when creativity and academic content knowledge are taught hand in hand. Without a deep knowledge of physics, all the creativity in the world wouldn't have led to Einstein's theory of relativity.

"Media and Digital Literacy: Resources for Parents"

Media and Digital Literacy: Resources for Parents

Young people are immersed in technology in ways previous generations could not have imagined. Common Sense Media has compiled this list of resources for parents seeking advice and information about how to help their children explore smartly and stay safe.

By Common Sense Media

Editor's Note: Kids are growing up on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter -- spending hours every day creating, communicating, and connecting in digital spaces. Whether you’re a tech-savvy parent or a technophobic one, you’re probably looking for tools to help your family navigate the many issues that come along with our media- and technology-saturated society. This digital world, which can bring young people incredible resources and learning opportunities, also opens up the very real parenting challenges of managing non-stop screen time, preventing cyberbullying, finding age-appropriate content, and more. Common Sense Media is an organization that provides essential resources for families to manage the impact of challenges like this. We've asked their editors to compile a list of their most popular articles and tip sheets to guide parents as they raise responsible and thoughtful digital citizens.

illustration of networked digital technology

Family Media Management

From movies to TV to games, kids are spending more time with electronic devices than ever before. Common Sense Media encourages parents to take control of the media and technology in their family's life in order to maintain a balance of rich learning experiences with entertainment.
Tip: Use media together. Whenever you can, watch, play, and listen with your kids. Talk about the content. When you can't be there, ask them about the media they've used. Help kids question and analyze media messages. Share your own values. Let them know how you feel about solving problems with violence, stereotyping others, selling products using sex or cartoon characters, or advertising to kids in schools or movie theaters. Help kids connect what they learn in the media to real-life events and other activities -- like playing sports and creating art -- in order to broaden their understanding of the world. (From "Tips for a Healthy Media Diet.")

More Resources from Common Sense:

Internet Safety and Online Privacy

In today’s world, where sharing is becoming the norm, there's a lot of talk about privacy and online reputation. Everything kids say or do online can affect how others view their character. These articles offer parents insight into how companies can collect and use their kids' data and personal information -- and what they can do about it.
Tip: Explain that nothing is really private online. It's crucial for kids to guard their own online privacy by not posting and sharing things they don't want to become public. A few more tips: Ask permission before you go online. Never share passwords. Keep personal details -- name, address, phone number, how much money your parents make -- to yourself. Think before you post -- is this really something you want to share? Only communicate with people you know -- never chat with or send photos to strangers. (From "Parents’ Guide to Protecting Kids' Privacy Online.")

More Resources from Common Sense:

Social Networking and Virtual Worlds

Now more than ever, kids are chatting, sharing, and connecting on social networking sites. The latest research from Common Sense reveals that teens are avid, daily users of social media, and 75% of them currently have a profile on sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Formspring. While they can use social tools to get the best of what the Web has to offer, tragic stories of cyberbullying seem to be a daily news staple. These tips and resources will help parents keep kids' online lives responsible, respectful, safe, and private.
Tip: Help kids understand the line between funny and cruel. Kids' online communication is often purposely ambiguous or accidentally cruel -- both of which can lead to misunderstandings. If drama starts brewing, ask your kid to call or speak face-to-face with their friend to clear it up. (From "Five Things You Need to Know About Cyberbullying.")

More Resources from Common Sense:

Role Models and Stereotypes

Kids look up to celebrities -- and take their cues from people they admire. Too much sexy material and violent imagery can affect their behavior and the choices they make. Body image, self-esteem, and weight issues are all affected by the media that young people watch, play, and interact with. These articles help explain the influence of celebrity culture and media stereotypes. They'll help parents make healthy, age-appropriate choices for their family.
Tip: Grab the headlines, and make them teachable moments. If you see teen drinking on a TV show -- or you see pictures on the Internet of celebs smoking pot or getting arrested for drunk driving -- check in with your kids. For young kids, see how much they understand. Grade-schoolers get a lot of confusing information from their peers, so set the facts straight. For preteens, turn celebrity misbehavior into teachable moments by letting them know what you think about the behavior. And for teens, ask questions. For example, if a celebrity they like is in trouble with alcohol, ask whether their peers are using alcohol or whether they have any anxieties or questions about drinking. Take time to share your opinions -- and expectations -- about the issues. (From "When Good Role Models Go Bad.")

More Resources from Common Sense:

Educational Issues

We all want our kids to succeed in school. We want to reinforce classroom learning and values at home and be well-equipped to address some of the issues that come up while our kids are navigating technology and digital media to support their schoolwork. These articles will help families guide their kids to make smart, ethical decisions in their digital lives.
Tip: Don’t assume that your children automatically know what’s right and wrong. The digital world operates with different rules -- that is, wherever rules even exist. Establish rules about use right from the start. Make sure kids have cited their material, clearly indicating where they found that statistic, that insight, that map. Be explicit about what is and isn’t acceptable behavior. Don't assume they know. And make sure you have real consequences for breaking the rules. (From "Cheating Goes High-Tech.")

More Resources from Common Sense:

It's our hope that these curated parent tips and resources will help guide you through both the challenges and opportunities that come along with raising kids in a digital world. For more information, media reviews, and advice, visit the Common Sense Media website.

"The Brutal Years"

The Brutal Years

‘Sticks and Stones,’ Emily Bazelon’s Book on Bullying

Gabriella Giandelli

By ANDREW SOLOMON

Published: February 28, 2013

The question of whether humans are becoming more brutal or more civilized has been debated urgently by the Athenians, the philosophers of the Renaissance, the Victorians and the existentialists. Those who argue that cruelty is currently becoming more acute point to the Rwandan genocide, global warming, and the malicious acts of selfish corporations and corrupt politicians. Contrariwise, others point to a safer and kinder society of greater prosperity and less prejudice against social, religious and ethnic minorities; Steven Pinker’s 2011 book, “The Better Angels of Our Nature,” proposes that we live more peaceably now than ever before. The dichotomous argument has particular resonance in the context of childhood. Teachers no longer routinely hit students; laws require accommodations for young people with learning disabilities; parents keep watch for teachers’ abuse and vice versa; developmental therapists are around every corner. Yet the Internet has unleashed meanness of a previously unimagined scope and celerity; broken households escalate children’s proclivity to launch unmonitored assaults on weaker kids; ethics are preached neither at home nor at school; and the accessibility of assault rifles enables nearly apocalyptic juvenile excess. Adult bullies from talk radio to Congress get constant airtime, and in many quarters their belligerence is applauded. Still, we are shocked when children behave belligerently toward one another. Youthful aggression has always been a problem and always will be; the pitilessness of childhood, like that of the world, is most likely a constant quantity.

STICKS AND STONES

Defeating the Culture of Bullying and Rediscovering the Power of Character and Empathy

By Emily Bazelon

386 pp. Random House. $27.

Enlarge This Image

Nina Subin

Emily Bazelon

Emily Bazelon’s intelligent, rigorous “Sticks and Stones” charts the experiences of a few bullied children and synthesizes the scholarship on how to contain or prevent such harm. She focuses primarily on the stories of three kids: an African-American girl, Monique McClain, who became the target of a few girls at her school in Connecticut, went through a depression and finally switched schools and found happiness; a gay boy in upstate New York, Jacob Lasher, who struggled against prejudice but also enjoyed being a provocateur; and Phoebe Prince, an Irish girl transplanted to a town in Massachusetts, who was bullied atrociously and committed suicide. Bazelon includes chapters on anti-bullying measures with good track records. She reviews jurisprudence on bullying, and examines both the virtues and the pitfalls of treating it as a crime. She tries to delineate what parents can achieve, what schools can achieve, and what may come of the shifting power differential among parents and schools and social agencies.

Bazelon is at her best as a storyteller, and the most interesting parts of the book are its human narratives. She resists the idea that there is always an innocent victim; among her three subjects, she paints Monique as essentially blameless, but the others as having some hand in their own suffering. Her writing about Phoebe Prince for Slate, which inspired and is expanded in this book, is especially trenchant; it rejects the simple “bullied to death” narrative that dominated the media at the time. Bazelon indicates that Phoebe’s situation was complicated: she had been cutting herself, had had problems in a previous school, had made a prior suicide attempt and had gone off her antidepressants six weeks before she took her life. Given Phoebe’s history, Bazelon writes that she couldn’t understand the prosecutor’s decision “to lay the burden of her suicide at the feet of six adolescents.”

If charity begins at home, then so, too, does brutality: at home and early, and Bazelon looks for the seeds of troubling behavior in the home lives of bullies. She is taken with the work of Dan Olweus, the grand old man of anti-bullying theory and practice, whose programs target the school, the classroom and the individual. She describes a headmaster who was able to transform the climate at his school largely through charisma, will and the methodology proposed by George Sugai, who believes that positive rewards given to students for positive social skills may be just as effective as punishment for those who are out of line. Investigating the role of the Internet in modern bullying, Bazelon visited the offices of Facebook, achieving an unusual degree of access. She describes both the company’s woefully inadequate anti-bullying protocols for young subscribers — Facebook’s current business model seems built on “habituating kids to giving up their privacy” — and their ill-advised efforts to bully her once they got a whiff of her criticisms. Bazelon explores the role of adults in the lives of kids who are bullied, and shows that often, parents and teachers who set out to help end up exacerbating the problem. She refuses the notion that the real reason for bullying is violent video games, rock music, parental neglect, social media or any other single cause. She thinks with nuance, making it clear that the problem is overdetermined and requires complex, subtle solutions.

Armchair Travels With Screen-Worthy Children

“Zarafa,” from France, is one of the movies in the New York International Children’s Film Festival. More Photos »

By LAUREL GRAEBER

Published: February 28, 2013

Maki, a 10-year-old African boy, escapes the shackles of slave traders and flees through the desert, where his fate becomes entwined with that of an orphaned giraffe. Mei, 13, witnessing her parents’ disintegrating marriage, runs away to the mountains with a tormented boy from her class. Celestine, an artistic mouse, abandons her fellow rodents who live underground and goes to dwell with a member of an enemy species: Ernest, a bear.

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Slide Show

New York International Children’s Film Festival

Clip: ‘Ernest & Celestine’

These are among the many voyages, inner and outer, in the New York International Children’s Film Festival, which starts Friday and runs through March 24 in seven theaters in Manhattan. Showcasing about 100 titles from 35 countries — chosen from 3,500 entries — the annual festival also takes young audiences on a radical journey: away from superhero spectacles and good-versus-evil showdowns and into a world of character-driven stories, painterly animation and resolutions that aren’t always tidy.

The festival tries “to push and expand the boundaries” of children’s film and “maybe defy expectations,” said Eric Beckman, its director, who founded it in 1997 with his wife, Emily Shapiro. “Or at least it will defy the parents’ expectations, because I think children are really open to a wide range of things.”

This year that variety will reach a bigger audience. Although the festival showcases films from its archives regularly at the IFC Center in Greenwich Village and in other cities, and its parent organization, Gkids, has become a theatrical distributor, the festival’s annual competition has been limited to New York. But next month will bring the debuts of the Los Angeles International Children’s Film Festival and the Boston International Children’s Film Festival, with San Francisco and Miami to follow in the fall.

Those cities’ programs will be shorter but will have the flavor of the New York event, which ranges from “Meet the Small Potatoes,” the American animator Josh Selig’s mockumentary about a pop band of enterprising spuds (screening Saturday, with an appearance by Mr. Selig), to the American premiere of “Approved for Adoption,” a subtitled French, Belgian and Swiss documentary. While Mr. Beckman described “Small Potatoes” in an interview as “ ‘This Is Spinal Tap’ for toddlers,” he called “Approved” “an adult film primarily.”

“I don’t think any other children’s film festivals will play it,” he said. Yet “Approved” has a compelling theme for the young: the identity issues arising from adoption. Directed by Laurent Boileau and Jung Henin, it uses Mr. Henin’s hand-drawn animation and Super 8 family films to tell his experiences as a Korean with Belgian parents.

“You do find some surprising, mature subjects,” the director Gus Van Sant said of the festival in a telephone interview. For several years he’s been one of its jury’s more than a dozen members, along with the Oscar-winning animator John Canemaker and the French filmmaker Michel Ocelot, whose latest 3-D animated feature of African fables, “Kirikou and the Men and the Women,” is part of this year’s slate. (The jury awards prizes to short films only — the best animated and the best live action — which then become eligible for Academy Award consideration; audience members vote for the festival’s grand-prize feature and short.)

Mr. Van Sant said he saw similarities to festivals like Sundance in the films’ devotion to “blazing new territory.” This year’s “Flicker Lounge,” a shorts program for teenagers, includes Julia Ducournau’s live-action French film “Junior,” about a girl’s frightening transformation, while the aptly named program “Heebie Jeebies” offers Joni Mannisto’s “Swarming,” Finnish animation that’s creepy-crawly in every sense.

Feature-length animation, which Mr. Beckman sees as the greatest strength of this year’s festival, kicks off the event on Friday with the American premiere of “Ernest & Celestine,” a French and Belgian celebration of nonconformity that just won a César Award for best animated film. (Benjamin Renner, one of its three directors, will attend the opening.) As the mouse Celestine paints, her work takes shape in animation that flows like watercolors.

Vikram Veturi’s “Hey Krishna,” having its American premiere on Sunday, brings digital technology and Bollywood style to a Hindu god’s biography. The French film “Zarafa,” directed by Rémi Bezançon and Jean-Christophe Lie, follows the escaped boy and his beloved giraffe with lush, hand-drawn imagery. Mr. Beckman is also showing one Disney hit, but in an unexpected way: “¡Rompe Ralph!,” Rich Moore’s “Wreck-It Ralph” in Spanish (with subtitles), introduces a festival section for Spanish-speaking audiences.

The festival is “giving children and the adults that go with them a better idea of how protean animation is,” Charles Solomon, an animation critic and historian, said in a telephone interview. He also credited it with broadening the audience for Japanese animation: Offerings this year include “Wolf Children,” about the unruly offspring of a woman and a werewolf, directed by Mamoru Hosoda (“Summer Wars”), who will appear at one of the screenings, and “From Up on Poppy Hill,” by the renowned Studio Ghibli (“Spirited Away”). The first feature collaboration between the director Goro Miyazaki and his father, the groundbreaking animator Hayao Miyazaki, “Poppy Hill” combines poignancy and humor in chronicling a budding adolescent romance in Yokohama in 1963. Filled with vintage Japanese pop, the film captures the growing pains of both its characters and the postwar nation.

The festival also has variety in its live-action slate. Vincent Bal’s Belgian and Dutch caper “The Zigzag Kid,” having its American premiere on Saturday, follows a boy on a wild ride to solve a criminal mystery and unravel his own past — all in time for his bar mitzvah. Tom Shu-yu Lin’s much darker “Starry Starry Night,” from Taiwan and showing on Sunday in the festival’s “Girls’ POV” program, follows the disaffected teenager Mei into a fantasy world populated by huge origami animals.