KC Compton

In reviewing the extensive body of research on children’s language development, you might see that “parents” are assumed to be mothers, and fathers are rarely included.Yet, parents—in all their variations—shape the linguistic and cognitive development of every child in their household.

Children’s Health & the Peril of Climate Change
Frederica Perera
Oxford University Press, 236 pages
When we think of climate change, many of us instantly imagine the famous image of that desperate, bedraggled polar bear adrift on a melting ice floe. Few of us would hear "climate change" and imagine a small, asthmatic child struggling for her next breath, or a stillborn baby, or a young adult whose life will be forever diminished by cognitive difficulties.

A visitor looking for Eastside Baby Corner (EBC) might be excused for thinking they were searching for a modest storefront in a quiet strip mall staffed by a handful of devoted volunteers. They would be right about the devoted volunteers but mistaken in all other details. This “corner” is a bustling warehouse in Issaquah, a community in King County, east-southeast of Seattle. On any given day it’s a hive of activity as people drive through to drop off donations, pick up items for distribution...

It is time to put a certain unhelpful myth to rest.
For decades, a common belief has held that speaking more than one language in a child’s home confuses the child, makes it more difficult for them to learn English and might even hold them back in school and in life. The unfortunate consequence of this belief has been that some dual-language households have enforced an “English-only” rule around the children, leaving non-English speaking members of the family constrained and the child disconn...

When Scott Koloms took over in 2001, the company had 30 employees and was doing about $1.25 million in sales as a commercial cleaning company that customized and provided cleaning programs for educational, financial, manufacturing and office facilities. The company now is tracking $20 million in sales and employs more than 800 people in branch operations throughout Kentucky and southern Indiana. ...

Founded in 1923 by the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America, Amalgamated Bank in New York City was born of a belief that workers and their families had as much right to affordable banking as corporations and high rollers. The bank has continued to demonstrate its commitment to progressive causes and the needs of working people through modern times. ...

When Lalit Adhikari’s chance to immigrate to the U.S. finally arrived, he had only one request: “Please, I don’t care where you send me, as long as it’s someplace cold.” His family had fled religious persecution in Bhutan, only to spend 17 years crowded into a hot, dusty refugee camp in Nepal. Lalit yearned to breathe fresh air and freedom. ...

Thanks to U.S. public policy going back decades, nearly 40 million people in this country live below the poverty line of $26,200 for a family of four. This reality is not a bug but a feature of a system designed along the lines of “God bless the child that’s got their own.” Poverty is generally seen to be—and is promoted as—a personal failure, a moral deficit or the product of laziness and bad character.
As authors Joanne Samuel Goldblum and Colleen Shaddox point out in their blistering, deep...

For babies to have the best start in life, they need to form a deep emotional bond with the person who provides most of their care—usually their mother. Not every baby gets that chance. Sometimes it’s as simple as a mother wrestling with the “baby blues”—feeling so worried and fatigued she can’t think of much except when she’ll get some shuteye. About 80 percent of new mothers experience some version of baby blues, which subside on their own within a couple of weeks with both mom and baby no ...

The Covid-19 pandemic has been a catastrophe that helped reveal some of the deepest fissures in the isolated nuclear family, upending the American archetype for family life—the “Ozzie and Harriet/Homer and Marge” model—and creating an almost unimaginable level of stress for working parents. We can’t go back to being foragers, but we can take a few pages from our prehistory to work out more social, workable models for the future.
In American society, as females become women of a certain age, t...

In choosing to quote Dr. Seuss’s The Lorax in the epigraph of her society-shaking book, What the Eyes Don’t See: A Story of Crisis, Resistance and Hope in an American City, Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha not only sets the tone for the book, she reveals her guiding principles and provides a blueprint for anyone wanting to change the conditions they confront.

The game of peekaboo is a universal language—and there’s way more to it than you might imagine.
You know the game: the big person covers their face with their hands or ducks out of sight. They’re gone! They suddenly reappear and say, “Boo!” and the baby is delighted. This delight delights the big person, who does it again. Hilarity ensues; rinse, repeat, in a social interaction that, though nonverbal, is the back-and-forth, call-and-response of baby’s first conversational turn.
Hilarity ensue...

If you visit the City of Decorah’s website, the second item you’ll see on the navigation bar is “Sustainability.” The town embraces prosperity, environmental stewardship, and social and cultural vitality, without assuming any one of these qualities outweighs the others.

From carbon emissions and food prices to green businesses, the Worldwatch Institute's latest publication, Vital Signs, Volume 21 documents more than two dozen trends that are shaping our future. Through concise analyses and clear tables and graphs, the 21st volume of the Worldwatch Institute series ...

When you see a baby gazing on the world, you might imagine a little sponge passively soaking up information. Don’t let that baby face fool you. What’s actually going on is computational wizardry so sophisticated that it outpaces any known machine, sorting multiple data feeds and running statistics millisecond by millisecond to extract and analyze essential information about the baby’s environment. Those little brains are busy. And a large chunk of that analysis involves cracking the complicat...