Professor Joseph Nelson has seen first-hand how harmful stereotypes can be to children as they develop and grow. Whether it’s in the classroom or at home, adults pigeonhole children into thinking and feeling in ways that adults expect them to. Black boys, for example, are seen as hypermasculine, hypersexual, and violent, and they’re more likely to think of themselves in those ways because of how adults treat them.

Author and professor Lise Eliot follows up on Nelson’s comments with a reminder that adults may tell children to follow their dreams, but they often still think of children as hard-wired to follow a certain path because of their race, gender, etc.

For many educators, standardized tests are both loathsome and a fact of life. But they’re most often talked about in context of teachers and school performance, not their impact on student development. Watch as Lise Eliot and Joseph Derrick Nelson discuss how a better vision of standardized tests might help both teachers and parents:

Prepare to be uncomfortable, warns writer Sarah Rich. Children are embracing ideas of gender and identity that invite ambiguity, and it’s no secret that many people don’t respond well to ambiguity.

But Joseph Nelson reminds us that our best resource for learning to support children who adopt ambiguous identities is the children themselves. Listen, ask, and learn, says Nelson, and work together to build a support system.

First it was TV, then it was computers, now it’s cell phones. Cell phones are incredible pieces of technology, but in some ways they’re also a pandora’s box. How should parents and educators incorporate cell phone use into the daily life of children?

In response to an audience question about appropriate cell phone usage for children, Sarah Rich argues that the best thing we can do is to model for children what a relationship with cell phones looks like.