KC Compton

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...

Getting a child outdoors to embrace literacy, art and the great outdoors is simple: All you need is a cordless drill, a mallet, a good auger bit and, of course, a delightful storybook.
At least that’s been the successful recipe for PopUp StoryWalk, an arts and literacy advocacy organization in the Seattle area that for the past four years has gotten thousands of families outside with their kids to read colorful children’s books installed on trails throughout the Puget Sound area.
Elisabeth Le...

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...

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.

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...

This may be one of the saddest facts you read in a while: One in three moms in the U.S. struggle to afford diapers for their babies. One in three. And although more than five million U.S. babies and toddlers live in poor and low-income families, no government programs provide diapers or funding to purchase them.
Diapers are not what automatically comes to mind when we think of poverty, but to Joanne Samuel Goldblum, co-author with Colleen Shaddox of Broke in America: Seeing, Understanding, an...

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...

The massive inequality that characterizes children’s opportunity to learn and succeed in the U.S. is no secret. Children who have a basic knowledge of reading and math by the time they enter school are more likely than their peers to be successful academically, attain higher levels of education and secure employment in later years. But as early as 18 months, children in lower socio-economic circumstances already experience disparities in vocabulary and language processing compared with their ...

Call it baby talk, call it parentese or call it infant-directed speech—whatever term you choose, babies love it, in any language. They particularly love it in the language they hear at home: Research shows that as early as six months, babies can pick up on the differences in languages around them and show a preference for language they hear in their everyday environment.
To be clear, the baby talk we’re discussing is not of the goo-goo, gah-gah sort of speech. Infant-directed speech is the hi...

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.

I stumbled out of bed this morning at the insistence of two medium-sized dogs and a cat who’s much louder than his size. I hadn’t had my coffee yet, but they were dancing and prancing in front of the door, and I knew resistance was futile. So I flipped on the coffee pot, threw on a couple of layers of fleece and headed out, grumbling against the cold and my subcutaneous early-morning resistance to always following the dogs’ agenda instead of my own.
We headed up into the orchard just as dawn ...

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 ...

If I were named Queen for a Day, these are a few of the new rules I would hereby order for all those angry white people who think they want a whites-only world...