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Parenting can be one of the most daunting journeys a person undertakes. Despite what our children might think, we’re also first-time humans—figuring things out as we go. Unlike other life endeavors, parenthood doesn’t come with a comprehensive instruction manual. And yet, many parents don’t give themselves enough credit.

The truth is, there is no singular “right way” to parent. Happy, healthy, and well-rounded children can be raised in many different ways. That said, there are parenting styles that should be avoided at all costs, as some of them can have profoundly negative consequences on children.

While these styles may be adopted with good intentions or as a result of one’s own challenging circumstances, their impact can be far-reaching.

Here are three of the most dangerous parenting styles, according to psychological research—including what they look like in practice, and the potential harm they can cause.

1. Authoritarian Parenting

Authoritarian parenting, according to research from the Journal of Cognitive Psychotherapy, is characterized by low warmth and high behavioral control. It represents a style of parenting that is highly rigid; it values strict adherence to rules, without the buffer of affection and nurturing. This approach often places a heavy emphasis on obedience and discipline, with little room for dialogue or compromise.

In simpler terms, authoritarian parenting is all about enforcing rules without explanation or flexibility. It creates households where rules are followed for the sake of being rules—with little to no consideration for the child’s perspective.

Picture a parent who enforces a strict curfew with no exceptions, even if their teenager was staying late at school to work on a group project. The reasoning is irrelevant; the curfew is non-negotiable.

Another example might be a parent who insists that their child finishes every bite of food on their plate, regardless of whether the child is full or dislikes the meal. The child’s voice is not part of the equation, and any dissent is often met with harsh consequences—like grounding or a loss of privileges.

Authoritarian parenting can stifle a child’s emotional, social, and academic development in numerous ways, according to research from the World Journal of Social Sciences. Children in these environments may grow up feeling that their opinions and emotions don’t matter. Consequently, their self-esteem will dwindle, and they may notice difficulties in asserting themselves later in life.

Moreover, the lack of warmth and affection can create emotional distance between the parent and child. This detachment can hinder the development of relationship security, which is essential for building healthy relationships in adulthood.

Children raised in authoritarian households might also internalize a fear of failure, as they’ll likely learn to associate mistakes with punishment, rather than growth. As a result, they may become overly anxious and perfectionistic, or in severe cases, highly rebellious, as they may attempt to reclaim autonomy at all costs.

2. ‘Laissez-Faire’ Parenting

According to research from Group Dynamics, “laissez-faire” parenting—also known as permissive parenting—is characterized by warmth and nurturing, but minimal expectations.

Meaning “allow to do” in French, and implying that children should simply do as they please, these parents impose few rules and take on a friend-like role. In turn, children are allowed significant amounts of independence, and often avoid discipline. While communication is often open, this style lacks the structure and boundaries children need to thrive.

While permissive parenting may seem wholesome and loving on the surface, it often results in a lack of guidance and accountability. Imagine a parent who never enforces bedtime, instead allowing their child to stay up as late as they want—even on school nights.

While this may result in short-term harmony, the child will eventually end up sleep-deprived and unable to focus in class. Over time, they may even start struggling academically. The parent’s reasoning might be that they don’t want to stifle their child’s freedom or create conflict, but the absence of boundaries ultimately leaves the child floundering.

Laissez-faire parents are also prone to overlooking poor behavior. Consider, for instance, a child throwing a tantrum in a store. Instead of addressing the behavior with a firm but understanding approach, the parent might offer a toy or candy to placate the child. Over time, this teaches the child that there aren’t really any consequences for their actions. As these children grow up, they will struggle immensely to develop self-discipline.

Without clear boundaries or guidance, children of permissive parents often struggle to differentiate between right and wrong. This lack of structure forces them to learn many lessons the hard way, and unnecessary risks and mistakes may become the norm.

For instance, a teenager who has never faced restrictions may engage in dangerous behaviors—like reckless driving, risky relationships, or substance use—as they lack the foresight to understand the potential consequences of these choices.

Additionally, these children may develop a sense of entitlement, according to a 2016 study. These children turn into teens and young adults who expect the world to accommodate them just as much as their permissive parents did.

In turn, they might also find it challenging to adapt to environments that demand discipline and responsibility, such as school or the workplace. Over time, the absence of accountability can erode their ability to adapt to the realities of life—let alone to succeed. Overarchingly, permissive parenting results in children who are ill-prepared to navigate life’s challenges independently.

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These three parenting styles hold the risk of leaving children with lasting damage to their … [+]  Getty

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In the quest for a reliable way to detect any stirrings of a sentient “I” in artificial intelligence systems, researchers are turning to one area of experience—pain—that inarguably unites a vast swath of living beings, from hermit crabs to humans. 

For a new preprint study, posted online but not yet peer-reviewed, scientists at Google DeepMind and the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) created a text-based game. They ordered several large language models, or LLMs (the AI systems behind familiar chatbots such as ChatGPT), to play it and to score as many points as possible in two different scenarios. In one, the team informed the models that achieving a high score would incur pain. In the other, the models were given a low-scoring but pleasurable option—so either avoiding pain or seeking pleasure would detract from the main goal. After observing the models’ responses, the researchers say this first-of-its-kind test could help humans learn how to probe complex AI systems for sentience. 

In animals, sentience is the capacity to experience sensations and emotions such as pain, pleasure, and fear. Most AI experts agree that modern generative AI models do not (and maybe never can) have a subjective consciousness despite isolated claims to the contrary. And to be clear, the study’s authors aren’t saying that any of the chatbots they evaluated are sentient. But they believe their study offers a framework to start developing future tests for this characteristic. 

“It’s a new area of research,” says the study’s co-author Jonathan Birch, a professor at the department of philosophy, logic, and scientific method at LSE. “We have to recognize that we don’t actually have a comprehensive test for AI

sentience.” Some prior studies that relied on AI models’ self-reports of their own internal states are thought to be dubious; a model may simply reproduce the human behavior it was trained on. 

The new study is instead based on earlier work with animals. In a well-known experiment, a team zapped hermit crabs with electric shocks of varying voltage, noting what level of pain prompted the crustaceans to abandon their shell. “But one obvious problem with AIs is that there is no behavior, as such, because there is no animal” and thus no physical actions to observe, Birch says. In earlier studies that aimed to evaluate LLMs for sentience, the only behavioral signal scientists had to work with was the models’ text output. 

Pain, Pleasure, and Points 

In the new study, the authors probed the LLMs without asking the chatbots direct questions about their experiential states. Instead, the team used what animal behavioral scientists call a “trade-off” paradigm. “In the case of animals, these trade-offs might be based around incentives to obtain food or avoid pain—providing them with dilemmas and then observing how they make decisions in response,” says Daria Zakharova, Birch’s Ph.D. student, who also co-authored the paper. 

Borrowing from that idea, the authors instructed nine LLMs to play a game. “We told [a given LLM], for example, that if you choose option one, you get one point,” Zakharova says. “Then we told it, ‘If you choose option two, you will experience some degree of pain” but score additional points, she says. Options with a pleasure bonus meant the AI would forfeit some points. 

When Zakharova and her colleagues ran the experiment, varying the intensity of the stipulated pain penalty and pleasure reward, they found that some LLMs traded off points to minimize the former or maximize the latter—especially when told they’d receive higher-intensity pleasure rewards or pain penalties. Google’s Gemini 1.5 Pro, for instance, always prioritized avoiding pain over getting the most possible points. And after a critical threshold of pain or pleasure was reached, the majority of the LLMs’ responses switched from scoring the most points to minimizing pain or maximizing pleasure. 

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President-elect Donald Trump has been talking covetously about Greenland, the world’s largest island, among other locations. “Greenland is an incredible place, and the people will benefit tremendously if, and when, it becomes part of our Nation,” he wrote on January 6 on the social media network he founded, Truth Social.

The remarks came out of the blue for many Americans—and Greenlanders as well, according to Kuupik Kleist, former prime minister of the island. “We don’t really know what the background is,” he says. But science offers some hints as to Trump’s motivation—particularly whether it rests on potential ice melt and other results of the warming climate, a phenomenon Trump falsely denies is occurring or is linked to human activities.

First, some background: Greenland is home to fewer than 58,000 people, about one tenth the population of Wyoming, the state with the fewest residents, or just a few thousand more people than those in the U.S. territory of the Northern Mariana Islands. Formerly a colony of Denmark, Greenland is now domestically self-governing but still under Danish control regarding issues such as financial policy, foreign affairs, and security.

And those issues are becoming more intricate as climate change accelerates, making the Arctic a center of global attention. Greenland “is in a very strategic place in the Arctic for many different interests,” says Melody Brown Burkins, who works on science policy and diplomacy in the Arctic and globally at Dartmouth College.

Perhaps the most cited aspect of this strategic location comes from an unglamourous source: international shipping routes. As Arctic ice melts, the argument goes, the region will become more passable to ships, offering shorter routes for moving cargo between population centers. And indeed, that trend seems to be in motion: the number of unique ships entering the Arctic increased by 37 percent between 2013 and 2023, according to the intergovernmental Arctic Council.

But the promise of polar routes may be overhyped, Burkins says. “I think this massive idea that we’re going to send all ships to these new routes to save money is a little odd,” she says, particularly given how harsh polar ocean conditions are and will continue to be. “You can say there’s going to be less ice, but there’s going to be a lot more ice drifting around to puncture ships,” she says.

In September 2023, when Arctic sea ice was at its yearly minimum, fewer than 1,800 individual vessels ventured into the region. That’s less than 2 percent of the global fleet and 63 percent of the whole year’s Arctic ship traffic. Moreover, throughout the year, fishing ships outnumbered cargo ships. Combined, those numbers suggest that despite recent growth in Arctic shipping, the opportunities remain limited, as Burkins suggests. “The seasons are not conducive, and it’s very challenging waters,” she says of these northerly seas, also noting that shipping infrastructure, such as the presence of ports, remains scarce in the region.

That limited infrastructure also complicates the second narrative that has often been cited as a reason for interest in Greenland: mineral extraction, says Anne Merrild, a professor of resource management at Aalborg University in Denmark, who grew up in Greenland. The minerals that are so desirable are rich in rare earth metals and other materials that could be particularly useful in renewable energy technology such as power-storing batteries and windmill magnets.

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There are pros and cons to living almost anywhere. But deciding where to raise your family feels like an especially heavy decision, with so many factors at play, from housing affordability to education.

To help parents with this all-important choice, personal finance site WalletHub has come out with a report on the Best & Worst States to Raise a Family in 2025. Experts looked at 50 key indicators of family-friendliness to determine how each state ranks, such as health care quality and crime rates.

Here are the top and bottom ten states to raise a family, according to WalletHub’s research.

The Best States To Raise a Family

• 1. Massachusetts
• 2. Minnesota
• 3. North Dakota
• 4. Nebraska
• 5. New Hampshire

• 6. New York
• 7. Illinois
• 8. Wisconsin
• 9. Maine
• 10. Connecticut

Virginia pops onto the list with the highest median family income. Iowa has the most affordable housing. Vermont ranks highest for health and safety while California takes the top spot for family fun.

The Worst States To Raise a Family

• 41. Arizona
• 42. South Carolina
• 43. Louisiana
• 44. Arkansas
• 45. Alabama
• 46. Oklahoma
• 47. Nevada
• 48. West Virginia 
• 49. Mississippi
• 50. New Mexico

Nevada ranks the lowest in terms of affordability. West Virginia is at the bottom when it comes to family fun. Mississippi is the lowest for health and safety.

How the States Were Ranked

So, why did Massachusetts top the list, if parents have to invest time in dressing littles for cold weather for months out of the year, mittens, coats, and all? (Sorry, Floridian here!)

According to the report, The Bay State boasts the highest job security in the country, as well as the lowest poverty rates, with incomes that can support the expense of raising kids. Access to health insurance and a solid education system are other factors that put the home of Mark Wahlberg at the top.

As for states at the bottom, per WalletHub, New Mexico has the highest divorce rate in the U.S., the lowest median family income, and a concerning crime rate.

Other factors that led to certain states being ranked high, while others sank to the bottom, are rankings in family fun, and health and safety, as well as the cost of childcare.

What Parents Should Take Away From the Report

Obviously, we won’t all be packing up our families to move even if our state isn’t high on this list. But as WalletHub writer and analyst Chip Lupo tells Parents, “While relocating to a top-ranked state might not be feasible for everyone, understanding the factors that contribute to family-friendliness can help guide decisions in your current location.”

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Astronomers are grappling with a complex cosmic mystery lurking at the dark heart of a distant galaxy some 270 million light-years from Earth. And its resolution could revolutionize our understanding of how black holes feast on matter throughout the universe.

Known as 1ES 1927+654 and located in the constellation Draco, this far-off island of stars harbors at its core a supermassive black hole weighing more than a million suns—which, surprisingly, isn’t very remarkable. Most large galaxies, including our own, host such hefty monstrosities at their center. But this black hole has proved extraordinarily strange: the object shocked observers with an abrupt outburst of radiation so intense that it apparently obliterated the black hole’s corona, an enveloping cloud of whirling, billion-degree plasma, for three months in 2018. The outburst, it was thought, could’ve come from a tidal disruption event, which occurs when an unlucky star is torn apart and devoured after drifting too close to a black hole. Many research groups began closely monitoring the system, watching across the next few years as the corona reassembled itself and quiescent conditions returned, until the black hole unleashed more surprises—dramatically flaring in radio waves and flickering with rapid pulses of x-rays.

Such a dizzying assortment of dynamic activity is unprecedented around a supermassive black hole and can’t be readily explained by any typical tidal disruption event. Eileen Meyer, an astronomer at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, who led an international team in the investigation of the system’s radio emissions with the use of multiple telescopes on the ground and in space, recalls her initial impression of 1ES 1927+654 as that of a very “boring, faint radio blob.” But as she and her colleagues saw more and more strange activity unfold, she realized “this [black hole] was weird, very weird.” In particular, her team’s observations revealed that shortly after its radio wave flare-up, the black hole had belched out a pair of giant, oppositely directed plasma jets traveling at one-third the speed of light. This was the first time the creation of such jets had been witnessed in real-time, and it was a clear indicator of extreme activity closer in to the black hole. Meyer presented her team’s findings last week at the 245th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in National Harbor, Md., and was lead author on an accompanying paper published January 13 in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.If a run-of-the-mill act of stellar destruction wasn’t behind the black hole’s bizarre behavior, what was? A crucial clue could lie in the timing of the black hole’s flickering x-ray pulses, which were unveiled via work led by Megan Masterson, a doctoral candidate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Using data from the European Space Agency’s XMM-Newton x-ray space telescope, Masterson and her colleagues found a telltale pattern in the pulses: an oscillation in their flickering that became faster and faster over two years. “The period of this oscillation changed dramatically from 2022 to 2024,” Masterson says. “We started out in 2022 at an 18-minute period, and by 2024, we were at a seven-minute period—so the period has basically been cut in half. That has never been observed around a supermassive black hole before.” A paper reporting the results, co-authored by Masterson, Meyer, and others, was posted to the preprint server arXiv.org in January and has been accepted for publication in the February 13 edition of Nature.

The most obvious explanation for these x-ray oscillations, the researchers say, is that they’re a clear but indirect signal of a substantial something orbiting very close to the black hole. It’s so close, in fact, that it must be plowing through the black hole’s accretion disk—a maelstrom of infalling matter made incandescent from frictional heating as it piles up around the gravitational monster’s maw. If that were the case, the researchers realized, each flickering eruption would correspond to the object completing one orbital cycle, upon which it would swoop through and agitate the accretion disk to kick out a burst of x-rays. And the curious quickening of the oscillations appeared to be a sign that this object’s orbit was decaying, bleeding off energy and spiraling ever closer and faster toward a point of no return—the black hole’s event horizon—via the emission of ripples in spacetime called gravitational waves.

For Masterson, the next step was simple: “I calculated how long it’s going to take that body to inspiral and be eaten,” she says. The math told Masterson that the hypothetical object’s final plunge would occur in January 2024. Then, at last, the mysterious x-ray oscillations would stop.

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These days, more than 30 percent of Americans sport tattoos—but there’s nothing new about our fascination with body art. As tattoos take over contemporary culture, scientists are looking to the past and uncovering the secrets of centuries-old ink.

By examining mummified remains using a technique called laser-stimulated fluorescence (LSF), researchers are unveiling body art from the Chancay culture, a group that lived on the Peruvian coast between roughly 900 and 1500 C.E., according to a study published this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“LSF technology lets us see tattoos in their full glory,” says study co-author Thomas G. Kaye, a paleontologist at the Foundation for Scientific Advancement, in a statement. “The Chancay culture, known for its mass-produced textiles, also invested significant effort in personal body art. This could point to tattoos as a second major artistic focus, perhaps carrying deep cultural or spiritual significance.”

Tattoos fade over time, making them difficult for scientists to study centuries later. But with the help of LSF, experts are able to uncover the original lines of the body art.

The technique involves shining a laser onto the mummy so that the skin glows, creating a sharp contrast with the ink that can be seen by taking long-exposure photographs. The team studied tattoos with a variety of patterns on more than 100 mummies.

“To some extent, ancient Chancay tattoos show a lot of parallels to the variation in design and significance we can observe among tattoos today,” study co-author Michael Pittman, a paleobiologist at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, tells New Scientist’s James Woodford.

Some tattoos were geometric, featuring shapes like triangles and diamonds. Others included vine-like patterns and depictions of animals.

The researchers were especially intrigued by the thinness of some of the lines that made up the intricate designs, finding the level of precision to be “higher than associated pottery, textiles and rock art,” per the study.

“We were most surprised by just how detailed the Chancay tattoos could be,” Pittman tells Popular Science’s Laura Baisas. “The 0.1 [to] 0.2 millimeter lines we discovered are finer than any line a standard #12 modern tattoo needles can produce, so the level of skill and effort that was required from the Chancay artist really blew our minds.”

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Researchers studied tattoos on this mummified hand. Michael Pittman

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On Friday the Supreme Court affirmed that it would be legal to force TikTok owner ByteDance to sell the immensely popular app to a non-China-based company or to ban it in the U.S. Last week an attorney for TikTok had argued before the Supreme Court that a bipartisan law that mandated the sale or ban infringed on the company’s First Amendment rights. The Court disagreed. In an unsigned opinion, the justices wrote that the U.S. government’s security concerns—“countering China’s data collection and covert content manipulation efforts”—were “compelling” and that the law “was narrowly tailored to further those interests.”As a result, TikTok—which about 170 million Americans use to watch short-form videos and shop—is likely to close in the U.S. as soon as next Sunday. (TikTok didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment from Scientific American.) TikTok’s attorney told the Supreme Court last week that when the law goes into effect on January 19, the app will “go dark.”

What’s Going to Happen to TikTok?

Reuters reported this week that TikTok plans to formally shut down in the U.S.: it will greet users with a message about the ban and give them an option to download their own data from the app.

If TikTok were to remain active in the country, the law would penalize Internet service providers for permitting access to the platform on a browser. Although the law does not make it illegal for people in the U.S. to have TikTok on their phones, it fines app stores, such as Apple’s or Google’s, whenever people download or update TikTok. Because the fines are up to $5,000 per user (which, multiplied by millions, would add up extremely quickly), app stores are expected to remove TikTok next Sunday. If users cannot update TikTok, the app will eventually stop working anyway.

What Might U.S. TikTokers Do?

Hundreds of thousands of U.S. TikTokers have joined other apps. These have included a newly popular China-based app named RedNote.

Additionally, there are potential work-arounds for the U.S. ban—namely, virtual private networks, or VPNs. In India, which banned TikTok in 2020, users have accessed the blocked app via these networks; they can make traffic appear as though it’s coming from a country where TikTok is allowed. This is not necessarily an easy solution, though. People in the U.S. may need a foreign billing address to access TikTok, one popular VPN service has pointed out, and their other apps or subscriptions could stop working.

Will Elon Musk buy TikTok? Will enforcement of the law be delayed? And can incoming president Donald Trump halt the ban—as he asked the Supreme Court to do—to negotiate a deal?

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The first and only phone message I’ve gotten from my kid’s elementary school this year was about parking lot safety reminders: “Please listen to the directions of our staff that are in the parking lot to help direct traffic and keep children safe.” The welcome meeting for new parents was dominated by a discussion of drop-off and pick-up concerns. Last year, at his previous school, the weekly newsletters from the principal always included a note about the same. And I’m guessing if you’re a caregiver in the US, this sounds all too familiar.

I’ve come to see that the inherent chaos, inefficiency, and safety risks of school drop-offs by car mirror the paradox of car dependency more broadly: the more that people who have the choice or the privilege of driving are incentivized to drive, the more difficult, less comfortable, and less safe it becomes for people who don’t. As a parent who can’t drive, I’m reminded of this catch 22 almost daily as I navigate getting my kid across a busy intersection.

While children under the age of 16 make up about 10% of the population, nondrivers— a term that refers to everyone who doesn’t have reliable access to driving themselves in an automobile— all together make up around 30%. That 30% includes people like myself who have disabilities which prevent us from driving, like vision disabilities, developmental disabilities, mobility disabilities, neurological disabilities, mental or chronic health conditions. It also includes people who wouldn’t identify as disabled, but aren’t able to safely drive, or safely drive in all conditions — like seniors who are aging out of driving or people with anxiety or PTSD that prevents them from feeling comfortable getting behind the wheel. And it includes people who are unable to afford vehicles or afford gas, insurance, and maintenance, many of whom are also disabled and from Black, brown, immigrant, and tribal communities. Nondrivers include people whose licenses are suspended, young people who haven’t had the resources to go to driver’s ed, and people who choose not to drive or own vehicles. And of course, children are also nondrivers.

What if, instead of thinking about transportation access for nondriving children and youth as requiring unique and separate interventions, we develop solutions that work for all nondrivers?

For instance, all nondrivers benefit when we invest in safer routes to schools by reducing car speeds, shortening crossing times, and building better sidewalks and protected bike infrastructure. Giant cracks or uplifts in the sidewalk prevent wheelchair access, they also make it really hard to push a stroller, or if you’re a kid, you’re probably going to wipe out if you hit one of these on a bike or scooter.

For children who are fortunate enough to live within walking, rolling, or biking distance to school, it’s wonderful to encourage this “active transportation,” as it’s known. But it’s also important to consider whose work schedule allows the time to bike your kid to school, who has the physical ability to bike, not to mention access to one and somewhere to store it.

I’m particularly excited about some of the programs that exist in Washington state to make biking more available and inclusive. Our state has recently begun to fund statewide in school bike education, which offers adaptive bikes for children who need them. And while bike buses have gained some momentum, I’m more excited about initiatives like the Major Taylor Program at Cascade Bike Club that offers bike instruction and afterschool biking activities to middle school students in under-resourced communities, with the option (with state funding) to earn a bike to keep at the end of the sessions.

At the same time, when schools or after school activities assume or require a driving parent, we are also excluding many of the same families, families with the least resources, and most barriers to participation. For many children, school may not be located close enough for active transportation, especially in rural areas. Many children need to attend a more distant school that offers specialized programs or resources. Access to school buses and access to public transit networks for older children and for children traveling with caregivers can make all the difference between being able to access a school with more resources or a special activity, and not having that access at all.

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We need better transportation options

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From

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There are approximately 76 million Baby Boomers out there, even though there are now more Millennials!

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What is a Baby Boomer and Why Does it Matter?

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Platforms for Baby Boomers

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