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No parent wants to see their child become bored and uninterested at school. Most don’t even realize when their kids are losing interest in learning, says author and parenting researcher Jenny Anderson.

Fortunately, parents can actively encourage their kids to be more curious and seek out opportunities to learn — and they can do it without resorting to nagging, according to Anderson, who co-wrote a book with education expert Rebecca Winthrop called “The Disengaged Teen” that published earlier this month.

In a survey of 65,000 third through 12th grade students that Winthrop conducted with the Brookings Institution, 75% of 3rd graders said they “love” school, but only 25% of 10th graders said the same, according to the survey. Meanwhile, 65% of parents of 10th graders said they believed their kids loved school.

“There’s a real mismatch,” Anderson said on an episode of the “Raising Good Humans” podcast earlier this month.

Kids who are engaged at school — meaning they’re curious and self-motivated to learn — perform better academically, and develop skills and traits that’ll help them in the long run. Children who are curious and intrinsically motivated are more likely to grow up to be happy and successful adults, research shows.

But student engagement has declined in the U.S. in recent years. Pandemic disruptions had negative effects on students around the world, and nearly half of U.S. teachers believe their students are less engaged at school now than in 2019, according to a 2024 survey by The Harris Poll for Discovery Education.

No matter how old your children are, you can encourage their curiosity and help them develop a lifelong love of learning, Anderson said. Here are her six recommendations:

Let them make decisions and experience consequences

Sometimes, you need to allow kids to make their own decisions — even if that means they face consequences from their actions, Anderson said. Instead of dictating a strict schedule for how and when they do their homework, for instance, parents could try giving kids the freedom to decide their own schedule.

You should still set firm boundaries — the expectation should always be that kids’ homework will get done — but giving children autonomy within those boundaries can help them develop confidence and motivation to make good decisions on their own, bestselling author and parenting expert Esther Wojcicki wrote for CNBC Make It in 2022.

″[We’re] there to support them as they make a bunch of extremely bad decisions [to learn] to make better ones,” Anderson said. “So hopefully, when they leave [home], they’re capable of making these decisions better.”

Avoid comments like ‘I’m not a math person’

Teach your kids to adopt a “growth mindset,” which involves thinking of your knowledge and abilities as skills you can develop over time, Anderson said.

People who take the opposite approach, a “fixed mindset,” tend to be less motivated to take on new challenges, so you should avoid making comments like, ”‘I’m not a math person. I’m not a science person,’” said Anderson.

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When Philip Sontag first visited Antarctica as a Ph.D. student, he brought back an unusual souvenir: a huge bag of penguin feathers. And now, after a decade-long analysis, Sontag and his colleagues have figured out how to use such feathers to create a living map of the mercury contamination that increasingly threatens Southern Hemisphere wildlife.

Mercury is a common by-product of gold mining, a growing industry in several southern countries. The toxic metal accumulates as it moves up the food chain by binding with amino acids in animals and then infiltrating their central nervous systems, where it can inhibit neural growth. Tracking mercury exposure is crucial for monitoring an ecosystem—but merely sampling rocks, ice or soil for its presence tells little about how much is actually entering the food web.

Many predators, including penguins, have evolved ways to dispose of mercury. The chemical builds up in feathers that the birds regularly molt in large quantities. Sontag, now a polar researcher based at Rutgers University, and his colleagues hoped to use molted feathers to determine where penguins picked up the toxic substance. The scientists were surprised to find a very clear correlation between the feathers’ levels of mercury and of a carbon isotope called carbon-13; the latter varies based on geographic location and thus acts as an indicator of “where the penguins are feeding or where their breeding grounds are,” Sontag says. These findings, published in Science of the Total Environment, confirmed this connection in seven penguin species scattered across the Southern Ocean—a pattern suggesting they’re exposed to more mercury farther north, where the comparatively warmer environment leads to higher carbon-13 levels.

These findings suggest that penguins could function as mercury bioindicators: living trackers of environmental pollutants, says the study’s senior author John Reinfelder, a marine biologist at Rutgers. Rather than measuring the chemical itself in a snapshot of time and place, he says, measuring penguin feathers’ mercury levels tracks the substance’s movement through the oceanic food web. For instance, penguin species known to reside near one another had varying

mercury and carbon-13 levels because of their different migration and feeding patterns. These data could be modeled into a maplike database to help guide future projects on conservation and polar science research.

Scientists consider penguins promising candidates for such bioindicators, says marine scientist Míriam Gimeno Castells, a Ph.D. student at the Institute of Marine Science from the Spanish National Research Council, who was not involved in the study. The animals are midway through the food chain. They breed in colonies, so researchers can easily scoop up feathers from many different individuals. Additionally, every breeding season they undergo dramatic molts; the feathers they lose “will contain the mercury that has accumulated during the nonbreeding season,” Gimeno Castells says.

Sontag’s next steps are to collect newer feathers to experiment with, across different species, and to measure mercury in penguins’ blood and prey to compare with levels of the substance in their feathers.

And how are the penguins themselves doing with their current mercury levels? “We don’t believe penguins have been exposed to toxic levels as of yet,” Reinfelder says. “Yes, the penguins will be okay.”

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Marie and her husband started seeing a couples therapist when the early years of parenthood put a strain on their marriage. Their two kids were 3 years and 4 months old, respectively, when COVID lockdowns began, and the couple were both stressed out and overwhelmed. (Marie—not her real name—said she was the one doing the lion’s share of the child care while her husband worked from home.)

In therapy, when she’d bring up a challenge with her husband or her kids, the therapist frequently brought the conversation back to a topic that surprised Marie: her relationship with her parents. The therapist had determined that because that early relationship was marked by “insecure attachment,” Marie was struggling to form a secure attachment with her husband. “I have issues with my parents,” Marie admitted, but she didn’t see why the therapist was so fixated on her childhood. The therapist assigned Marie and her husband a book on attachment to read together, and Marie started, at the therapist’s encouragement, attending solo sessions with an individual therapist to work through her childhood issues. Marie described that period as “really going down a wormhole.” She was doing her best to “heal her attachment style,” as her therapist insisted, but none of that work seemed to help things at home.

Whether you’re hearing it from a therapist, as Marie did, or picking it up on one of the countless attachment-focused accounts on Instagram and TikTok, chances are if you’re a new parent, you’ve taken in messaging around the need to give your child a “secure attachment,” or the urgency of fixing your own attachment issues lest you pass them on to your kid. “Securely attached” kids, the theory goes, will be socially confident and have a strong sense of self. As adults, they’ll make friends easily and have healthy romantic relationships. In contrast, “anxiously attached” adults are driven by fear of rejection and abandonment and have tendencies toward codependency, while the “avoidantly attached” among us have difficulty sharing feelings and trusting others. Your co-worker who’s clingy at happy hour? Probably anxiously attached. The boyfriend who takes forever to return your texts? Classic avoidant, or so pop psychology would have it. There’s a powerful lure in the idea that it might be possible to parent your kid so effectively that you’ll encase them in psychological Bubble Wrap and safeguard them against whatever relationship challenges have plagued you.

But there’s a flip side to all this: the sense that if our own pasts are a liability, any wrong move might damage our kids for life. Nicole McNelis, a therapist who frequently works with new moms, told me that many of her clients bring these messages from social media into sessions, worrying, for example, that because they bottle-fed their baby, he’ll be insecurely attached. McNelis followed up on this example by clarifying that that’s not how parenting works; there’s no single practice that will determine the quality of your relationship with your kid.

If reading about attachment has helped you feel as if you better understand yourself or your partner, or if it’s guided you toward approaching your parenting or your friendships in a more thoughtful way, I’m so happy for you. But if the idea of attempting to “heal” your insecure attachment before finding true love fills you with despair, or if you’re frantically trying to give your own child the “right” attachment style, I’ve got good news for you: “Attachment styles” have the sheen of science, but underneath, it’s basically all vibes.

Attachment styles were first defined by Mary Ainsworth, a Canadian-American psychologist who developed the Strange Situation, a procedure she used in experiments carried out in Baltimore in the 1970s. In the Strange Situation, a child between 9 months and 3 years comes to the lab with their primary caregiver, and they’re admitted to a room set up as a living room with various toys. After a few moments, a stranger enters, and a few moments after that, the caregiver leaves briefly, then returns. The child’s response to their caregiver’s departure and return, Ainsworth posited, reveals their attachment style. Once a child’s attachment style has been “set,” by about age 3, the theory goes, it’s more or less fixed. The message to moms is clear: If you mess up your kids early, you’ve doomed them for life.

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For all the world’s linguistic diversity, human languages still obey some universal patterns. These run even deeper than grammar and syntax; they’re rooted in statistical laws that predict how frequently we use certain words and how long those words tend to be. Think of them as built-in guardrails to keep language easy to learn and use.

And now scientists have found some of the same patterns in whale vocalizations. Two new studies published this week show that, despite the vast evolutionary distance between us, humans and whales have converged on similar solutions to the problem of communicating through sound. “It strengthens the view that we should be thinking about human language not as a completely different phenomenon from other communication systems but instead think about what it shares with them,” says Inbal Arnon, a professor of psychology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a co-author of one of the studies.

Arnon and her colleagues, whose paper was published on Thursday in Science, analyzed eight years of humpback whale song recordings from New Caledonia in the South Pacific—and found that they closely adhered to a principle called Zipf’s law of frequency. This mathematical-power law, a hallmark of human language, is observed in word-use frequencies: the most common word in any language shows up twice as often as the second most common, three times as often as the third most common, and so on.

Listen to the humpback whale songs:

But before they could analyze the recordings, the researchers had to identify the segments that were analogous to words (though, importantly, without semantic meaning) in a stream of otherworldly grunts, shrieks, and moans. They found themselves in the same predicament as a newborn baby—so naturally, that’s where they turned for guidance. Human infants “get this continuous acoustic signal,” Arnon says, “and they have to figure out where the words are.”

A baby’s strategy is simple: listen for unexpected combinations of sounds in adult speech. Whenever you identify one, you’ve probably located a boundary between words because those uncommon transitions are less likely to occur within words.

Incredibly, humpbacks may be using the same approach. When the researchers segmented whale songs based on these “transitional probabilities”—just as a human infant would—they fit Zipf’s law of frequency like a glove. On the other hand, 1,000 arbitrarily shuffled elements of the data came nowhere near a match, strongly suggesting the transitional probability results weren’t a product of random chance.“We were all dumbfounded,” says co-author Ellen Garland, a whale song expert at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. “There was the possibility of discovering these same structures. Did we think we would? Hell no.”

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Bernie is the most courageous and honest politician we have ever had. He is well loved and admired. He speaks relentlessly and powerfully for so many. Thank you, Sir.

When younger generations find inspiration in these words, there may be hope for democracy.

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Senator Sanders

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Many new parents struggle to put their child to bed, tackling everything from endless cycles of wake-ups to challenging nap times. Rest assured, these nighttime woes won’t last forever. Parents can begin implementing solutions today that can have a lasting impact, beginning with learning how to approach their child’s sleep differently.

To help you understand how to best tackle your child’s sleep issues and help them get through the night, we spoke to pediatric sleep experts for their fool-proof tips for babies, toddlers, and preschoolers. With just a few adjustments to your routines, your little one may just drift off to dreamland in no time flat.

How You’re Sabotaging Your Newborn’s Sleep

It may be tempting to cuddle your newborn to sleep to avoid hearing them cry at night, but experts recommend to stop this practice by the time they reach 3 months. Parents spend too much time rocking and holding their infant in the beginning of the night, preventing their newborn from learning how to self-soothe and slowing the development of healthy sleep-wake patterns.1

“As a result, a baby learns to fall asleep with this help—and then when [they] wake up during the night [they] can’t get back to sleep alone,” says Judith Owens, MD, director of the Center for Pediatric Sleep Disorders at Boston Children’s Hospital.

During the first several weeks of your baby’s life, nearly anything goes as you attempt to get your baby to sleep however you can. However, by the time they reach 3 months old, experts recommend putting them down in their crib “drowsy but awake.” Although they’ll cry for a while, soon, your baby will learn to drift off without help.

Here are additional ways you may be sabotaging your newborn’s sleep and what to do instead, according to experts.

You nap on-the-go

As much as possible, have your baby nap in their crib. “If [they] often fall asleep in a stroller or a car seat, [they’re] going to associate motion with sleep and have a hard time nodding off without it,” says Jodi Mindell, PhD, associate director of the Sleep Center at The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.

Aim for at least half, though ideally more, of your baby’s naps to be in their bassinet or crib.

You feed during bedtime

When her son was a baby, Angela Mattke, MD, a pediatrician at the Mayo Clinic Children’s Center in Rochester, Minnesota, would breastfeed right before putting him down. “Because of this, whenever he’d wake during the night, he wouldn’t fall back asleep until I breastfed him,” she says.

At 8 months, when he was still waking three or four times a night, she decided to switch the routine and start sleep training. After a challenging week in which she gradually allowed her son longer times to calm himself before returning to the room—while not offering additional nursing, Dr. Mattke’s son learned to self-soothe.

You may be able to avoid this problem by finishing your baby’s final feeding before you start the bedtime routine. Also, try to feed your baby in a room they don’t typically sleep in so they don’t associate nursing with bedtime.

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On a low hill near the coast of Maine, the fresh petals of double daffodils shake frills of gold and peach in a gusting breeze. It is the middle of May, a clear blue sky overhead, and the lacy burgundy foliage of peonies and new stalks of twiggy curly willow are poking through swaths of black landscape fabric. Against the walls of a greenhouse, seedlings of cosmos and celosia, lisianthus, and snapdragons rise in plastic trays. Mud season is barely over, but the turf is vivid green.

Those fragrant, frilly blooms will make up wedding arches and table settings, and bouquets, the mainstays of the profitable farm and floral studio that farmer Bo Dennis, 35, has built since he bought this parcel several years ago. “When people come to us, we say, this is what we’re good at: local flowers that are sustainably grown,” he says, tucking a curl of light hair back under his beanie with muddy hands. “Sometimes I do get clients that say, ‘We want all hydrangeas and all roses, and we want them in May’”—a date when those popular flowers won’t yet have bloomed in Maine. “I will say, ‘Great! Have a good celebration. I don’t think we’re the vendor for you.’”

What Dennis grows won’t be found among the blooms that cram the entrances of supermarkets, big-box stores, downtown florists—most of the places where people buy flowers in the U.S. The bouquets that fill those spaces overwhelmingly come from equatorial countries, such as Ecuador and Ethiopia, where cheap labor and minimal environmental regulation make growing affordable. Those flowers are part of an enormously successful international market that sells blooms thousands of miles from their fields of origin and earns more than $25 billion every year.

But pesticides and other agrochemicals required to sustain that scale of production can injure workers and their families. One ongoing study of children in Ecuador whose parents work at flower farms has documented deficits in attention and eye-hand coordination, particularly after periods when these chemicals are heavily sprayed. Children born to women who work in floriculture regions have higher-than-normal rates of birth defects, another study found. And the risks extend to people around the world. In Belgium, florists with imported flowers had unhealthy levels of pesticide chemicals on their gloves, levels high enough to burn the skin if it wasn’t protected. And in the Netherlands, prolific use of antifungals on the country’s signature tulips has fostered the emergence of deadly drug-resistant fungi.

The remedy for at least some of these problems is rising in small U.S. operations such as Dennis’s Dandy Ram Farm and others in North Carolina and Utah and throughout the country. Dennis came to floriculture out of a desire for economic self-sufficiency and career-long concern for the environment. He and other growers are building a new, surprisingly lucrative agricultural model—a “slow flower movement,” akin to the Slow Food movement, that offers a cleaner, greener alternative to modern floral production. They aim to protect ecosystems and build new economic pathways while bringing a bit of beauty—ungroomed, imperfect, unpredictable—back into the world.

Flowers are so present in our lives that we almost do not see them: sheathed in paper in every market, plunked in a vase on a table in any cafe. But while they are quotidian, they are also monumental; in many cultures, they memorialize the most important days of our lives, from graduations and promotions to weddings and funerals. They are vital to Catholic rituals, Hindu festivals, Buddhist temple offerings, and Mexico’s Day of the Dead—and also, via chrysanthemums, to the quasi-religion of U.S. college football homecoming games. (Mums are funeral flowers in parts of Europe and Asia, which might be a comfort to the losing team.) We invest them with so much meaning that we demand they always be perfect—although like any crop, they are fungible and fragile, subject to weather, diseases, and decay.

And like any product, they are subject to the lure of cheaper production offshore. The movement of American manufacturing to countries with fewer regulations over land and labor is an old story, reenacted in products from furniture to cars to food. But the relocation of flower growing was not an accident of global economics. It was deliberately fostered by the U.S. government, part of the 20th-century war on drugs.

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While the work of raising little humans has never been easy, being a parent in today’s world is especially anxiety-inducing.

In addition to juggling work, child care, and the household, parents are worried about social media, school shootings and the growing children’s mental health crisis, according to the U.S. Surgeon General’s 2024 advisory.

And parents are feeling the strain. According to a 2023 survey of more than 3,000 U.S. adults from the American Psychological Association, 48% of parents reported that most days, their stress is “completely overwhelming.”

Parents can prevent this daily pressure from escalating into burnout by spotting its signs — and finding solutions to help cope. Here are three red flags to look out for.

🚩Red flag No. 1: You’re so stressed and exhausted that you can’t enjoy family time. 

Sleep regressions, toddler tantrums, adolescent mood swings — yes, parenting has its challenges. But if you find it’s so emotionally, physically, or mentally draining most days that you can’t enjoy family time, you may be struggling with burnout, says Nekeshia Hammond, a psychologist who specializes in burnout prevention.

The symptoms are different for everyone. “For some people, burnout leads to agitation, irritability or withdrawal from your significant other or your children,” she says. Or you might feel it in your body: frequent headaches, sleep problems or a change in appetite.

The prolonged stress can also lead to longer-term health issues like high blood pressure, clinical depression or anxiety — so get ahead of it if you can.

👉 How to cope: The next time you’re caught up in a tough parenting moment — say, taking care of a toddler with a stomach bug while you have a stomach bug (and are on the brink of tears) — Hammond suggests simply taking a minute.

Set a timer on your phone, breathe deeply, and give yourself 60 seconds to “get your mind and body back to a calm state,” Hammond says. Hopefully, this will give you enough mental space to ask yourself: How am I doing? What do I need?

Try to turn this exercise into a daily practice. It can help you “make that mental shift that it’s OK to reset,” she says.

If you’re unsure whether you’re experiencing burnout, Hammond says to talk to your doctor or a mental health professional. The Postpartum Support International and the National Alliance on Mental Illness also have resources for parents.

🚩Red flag No. 2: You’re taking on most of your family’s “mental load.”

Do you find yourself doing all the planning, decision-making, and problem-solving in your household? Like coordinating the carpool schedule or figuring out when and how to potty-train your toddler?

That invisible labor is called the “mental load,” and it’s a major factor of parental burnout, says Eve Rodsky, an expert on the gender division of labor who has done research on this topic.

That burden is falling mostly on women. One recent study looked at data from 3,000 American parents and found that moms carried 71% of the mental load tasks at home, including chores like planning meals and managing household finances.

👉 How to cope: If you’re feeling overwhelmed by your workload, it’s time to let go of some of the reins.

If you have a partner or a co-parent, sit down together and do a time audit, says Rodsky. She suggests making three lists: your parenting and household tasks, your partner’s, and any shared roles. What stands out? Are there any chores you can reassign to your partner to help lighten your load? Any tasks that should fall off the to-do list for good?

Then, set up a weekly check-in to go over schedules and renegotiate household and child care tasks as needed, says Rodsky. It takes constant communication to ensure responsibilities stay manageable for everyone on the calendar.

If you’re a single parent, don’t be afraid to ask for help and accept it when you need it, says former U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy. People often want the opportunity to be a part of your life and show up for you. You’d pick up a friend’s kid after school, so why shouldn’t you be able to make the same ask?

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Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., faced a barrage of questions from U.S. senators today during his confirmation hearing for his nomination for secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services. The hearing focused on views Kennedy, an environmental lawyer with no medical training, has expressed on several important issues facing Americans’ public health today, including vaccines, chronic disease, and federal health care programs such as Medicaid. Kennedy’s responses could reveal how he would lead the government’s vast health and medical apparatus should he be confirmed.

“The hearing was a reminder of just how sprawling the Department of Health and Human Services is and just how far reaching the areas of health care that the secretary has their hand on,” says Jason Schwartz, an associate professor of health policy at the Yale School of Public Health, who specializes in vaccines and vaccination policy. “I was struck by, under questioning from both Republican and Democratic senators, the areas where there’s clearly not a great deal of familiarity on Kennedy’s part regarding major components of the HHS portfolio.”

Kennedy has made unsupported and dangerous claims about fluoridation, raw milk, and other topics. In the hearing, Democratic Senator Michael Bennet of Colorado also brought up Kennedy’s unsubstantiated past statement that Lyme disease was a bioweapon. Perhaps most notably, Kennedy has frequently promoted false or misleading claims about vaccines, though he tried to distance himself from some of them during today’s hearing.

“As the [hearing’s] questions pointed out, there’s been almost no one who’s been a more expansive critic of vaccines in his work for such a long time,” Schwartz says.

Here are five takeaways from the hearing that reveal what Kennedy’s leadership of HHS might look like.

Vaccines

Kennedy has a long record of antivaccine activism, despite the fact that his own children are vaccinated. He has falsely linked vaccines to autism and has benefitted financially from efforts to revoke the approval of certain vaccines. Despite this history, Kennedy stated in the hearing that he is “not antivaccine” but rather “prosafety.” Democratic senators begged to differ. Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon pointed to Kennedy’s visit to Samoa in 2019, which occurred months before a measles outbreak that killed 83 people, many of them children. Vaccination rates were already low following a tragic incident the previous year, when two nurses accidentally combined the MMR vaccine against measles, mumps, and rubella with a muscle relaxant, leading to the deaths of two children. Kennedy met with antivaccine advocates during his visit and later wrote a letter to the country’s prime minister inaccurately suggesting that a “defective” vaccine could have caused the infections. In the confirmation hearing, Kennedy denied responsibility for any role in the deadly outbreak, however.

During the COVID pandemic, Kennedy sought to revoke the approval of the lifesaving COVID vaccines just six months after their rollout. In the hearing, he said he was against the vaccines’ use in six-year old children and cited a misleading claim that that age group does not get severely ill from COVID. Yet health experts acknowledge the vaccines likely saved millions of lives, including children’s.

“The data clearly show that there has been plenty of risk of COVID in young children, and while it’s not as common a cause of serious illness or death as it is in older individuals, no one would argue that it isn’t still a significant health concern, and there’s a very good reason to continue to recommend vaccination in young children,” Schwartz says.

Medicaid

During the hearing, Kennedy was asked about his views on Medicaid, the government insurance program that supports nearly 80 million low-income Americans. (The program was plunged into uncertainty yesterday when the Trump administration announced a federal funding freeze that roughly coincided with the Medicaid portal temporarily going offline, which meant that people could not check enrollment status or submit claims.) Kennedy at times appeared to confuse Medicare and Medicaid in the hearing, Schwartz says; the nominee claimed that most people are dissatisfied with the latter program, despite clear evidence to the contrary. When questioned about whether he would cut Medicaid, he gave indirect answers stating he would follow President Donald Trump’s desire to reform it.

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