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...

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. ...

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 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...

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...

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...

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 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 ...

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...