1 . A new study published in the Journal of Marriage and Family claims that all that time you spend parenting just doesn’t matter. But it’s a claim that, despite the enthusiastic and widespread coverage by the media, does not hold water.

The research suggests that child outcomes (including behavior problems, emotional problems, and academic performance) are barely connected with the time that parents spend with their children. The researchers examined the time diaries of 1,600 children, looking at parenting time and outcomes when the kids were aged 3 to 11 in 1997, and again in 2002, when they were between 8 and 16. (A time diary is a detailed report of all activities you carry out in a day. )

This research largely reflects the failure of the authors to correctly measure parental input. It just looked at time diaries from two particular days-one a weekday and the other a weekend day.

Trying to get a sense of the time you spend parenting from a single day’s diary is a bit like trying to measure your income from a single day. If yesterday was payday, you looked rich, but if it’s not, you would be reported as poor. You get a clearer picture only by looking at your income — or your parenting time—over a more meaningful period.

What you did yesterday should not be taken as representative of what you did last year, This is why most high-quality studies of parenting time focus instead on how often parents read to their children, play with them or help their with homework over a period of a month or longer — long enough to represent their different approaches to parenting.

As an exhausted parent who doesn’t get enough time to work out, and who hasn’t seen a movie for months, I understand why so many of us might seize on studies suggesting that we should take more time for ourselves. Perhaps we should. But I agree with Ariel Kalil, a developmental psychologist, on the suggestion “that when parents spend high-quality time with their children, their children are more likely to succeed.”

2 . Mobile phone has become a problem for middle schools. Some middle schools in Australia have banned students from carrying mobile phones during school hours.

Mobile phone used among children bas become a problem for the school this year. Several children have got mobile phone as Christmas gifts, and more students will want them.

Mary Bluett, an official, said mobile phone use is a distraction(分心的事)to student during school hours and it also gives teachers so much trouble in their classrooms. Teachers were also saying that sometimes students might use phone messages to cheat during exams.

She said some schools had tried to ban mobile phones. Some parents felt unhappy because they couldn’t get in touch with their children.

Many teachers said students should not have mobile phones at school, but if there was a good reason, they could leave their phones at school office. They also said there were many reasons why the students should not have mobile phones at school: they were easy to lose and were a distraction from studies.

Many people say that they understand why parents would want their children to have phones, but they think schools should let the students know when they can use their mobile phones.

5 . Psychological science is full of interesting topics, many of which tell a coherent (连贯的) picture of human nature, but some of which create seemingly contradictory stories. A case in point is the tricky, and misunderstood, overlap (重叠部分) between strength-based science and the research on narcissism (自恋).

There is now convincing evidence to show that narcissism is on the rise, especially in our youth. Some researchers say that about 25% of young people show symptoms of narcissism. The inflated ego of Generation Me is reflected in reality TV, celebrity worship, and out-of-control consumerism.

We are correct to be concerned about this phenomenon, but our fear that all kids are potential narcissists has caused an unhelpful counter-reaction to approaches that seek to make our children and teens feel good about themselves.

In my own research on strength-based parenting, it is common for people to wrongly think this approach to be the cause of narcissism. Their argument seems to be that a child who knows his strengths will automatically view himself as better than everyone else. It is argued that the self-assurance that comes with identifying and using their positive qualities will make a child selfish and uncaring. Genuine confidence about one’s strengths is categorized as over-confidence; desirable self-knowledge is branded as excessive (过分的) self-admiration.

Why does this occur? It’s partly because more is known about narcissism than strengths. While strengths psychology has largely stayed within the limit of academic journals, research on narcissism has made its way into the mass media and our daily life. A famous magazine noted that narcissism is a favored topic and that people everywhere are diagnosing others with it.

The fear that a strength-based approach will cause narcissism also occurs because of our binary (非此即彼) thinking. We mistakenly believe that one cannot be both confident and humble. We focus on Donald Trump and Kim Kardashian rather than Mahatma Gandhi and Mother Teresa. Without confidence in their strengths, Gandhi and Mother Teresa couldn’t have achieved so much, and yet modesty and selflessness are their qualities.

When we assume that strength-focus is the same as a self-focus, we fail to make the idea clear that people who know their strengths are, actually, more likely to be pro-social and ready to help others.

It’s easy to conclude that every young person is at risk of becoming a narcissist but I’d like to stand up for the thousands of young kids I have worked with, who are caring, thoughtful and humble — even when they use their strengths.

6 . Every year, thousands of teenagers participate in programs at their local art museums. But do any of them remember their time at museum events later in life? A new report suggests that the answer is yes — and finds that arts-based museum programs are credited with changing the course of alumni’s (毕业生的) lives, even years after the fact.

The Whitney Museum of American Art, the Walker Art Center and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles recently asked researchers to conduct a study to find out how effective their long-standing teen art programs really are. They involved over 300 former participants of four programs for teens that have been in existence since the 1990s. Alumni, whose current ages range from 18 to 36, were invited to find out how they viewed their participation years after the fact.

Among the alumni surveyed, 75 percent of them thought the teen art program experience had the most favorable impact on their own lives, beating the family, school and their neighborhoods. Nearly 55 percent thought that it was one of the most important experiences they had ever had, regardless of age. And two-thirds said that they were often in situations where their experience in museums affected their actions or thoughts.

It turns out that participating in art programs also helps keep teens keen about culture even after they reach adulthood: Ninety-six percent of participants had visited an art museum within the last two years, and 68 percent had visited an art museum five or more times within the last two years. Thirty-two percent of alumni work in the arts as adults.

Though the study is the first of its kind to explore the impact of teen-specific art programs in museums, it reflects other research on the important benefits of engaging with the arts. A decade of surveys by the National Endowment for the Arts found that the childhood experience with the arts is significantly associated with people’s income and educational achievements as adults. Other studies have linked arts education to everything from lower dropout rates to improvement in critical thinking skills.

The Yosufs’ house is unlike any other house. In the sitting room, instead of a television, there is a blackboard on the wall. For two hours every day, Mr Yosuf writes complex mathematical problems on the board. His daughter, Zuleika, copies them into an exercise book and solves them.

Zuleika is special. She’s five years old, but instead of watching cartoons or playing computer games, her favourite pastimes are solving equations and reading books. She already spends hours every day in a university library. Next year Zuleika will become Britain’s youngest “A” level student.

Not surprisingly, the Yosufs are a very clever family. Zuleika’s two sisters and a brother, aged 16, 14 and 12 are also good at maths and are already at university. Her father, who specialises in maths research, has taught them all. “Zuleika is very competitive, says her father.” She sees her brother and sisters working every day and she can’t wait to catch up with them. I remember teaching the others maths when they were eight. Zuleika solves the same problems now, although she took up maths much earlier. We could see she was interested in numbers at a much younger age. ”

So what is the secret of their success? When their first child arrived, Mr Yosuf and his wife made up their minds to teach all of their children at home. They say that home tuition combined with love and understanding has helped their children to succeed. “We’ve been patient and supportive, and they take pride in what they do,” says Mr. Yosuf. “Maybe Zuleika has a natural talent for maths, but I believe given the right surroundings, any child could do well. ”

One thing all child prodigies(神童) do have in common is a complete dedication to and love of their subject. They spend many more hours working at it than the average child, and this extra effort is reflected in their achievements. It is not necessary to be extremely talented to be a child prodigy, but you do have to have a lot of motivation.

9 . If you had to pick one, who do you think is greater in terms of their contributions to the Western world: British physicist Isaac Newton or Greek philosopher Aristotle?

Chances are that you’d find it hard to make a decision, at least right away.

But somehow, when choosing a major in college, the line between the two areas of study couldn’t be clearer. Science majors － the likes of technology, engineering, math － are considered to be more practical choices because of the wealth of opportunities, while those who choose a liberal arts (文科) major － language, music, philosophy － may have more difficulty finding a job.

But perhaps we should look at liberal arts studies in another way to understand its value. In the BBC’s documentary Civilizations, for example, presenters (主持人) take us to 31 countries on six continents to appreciate human creativity in its tangible(有形的) form, such as Angkor Wat (吴哥窟) in Cambodia, and the Suleymaniye mosque (苏莱曼清真寺) in Turkey.

To Simon Schama, one of the presenters, human civilization isn’t just about technological inventions or meeting basic needs, but about creating things for the purpose of leaving a person’s “mark of their existence for future humans to witness and admire”.

By comparing science and liberal arts, we’re drawing “an artificial (人为的) line” between the two, wrote Loretta Jackson-Hayes, an associate professor of chemistry at Rhodes College in Memphis, US, on the Washington Post website. And to some of the greatest innovators (革新者) in history, this line never existed in the first place.

Leonardo da Vinci, for example, was just as successful a scientist as he was a painter. He was so interested in biology and anatomy (解剖学) that he drew the famous Vitruvian Man, part of his study of the proportions (比例) of the human body. Then there’s Steve Jobs, who, despite being an engineer, was also an artist. He summarized his view on the relationship between science and the arts in 2011: “It’s in Apple’s DNA that technology alone is not enough － it’s technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields (提供) us the result that makes our heart sing.”