Understanding childhood, including the one you accompany

A third of two-year-olds were in school in France in the early 2000s, against a small fraction today. Evaluations explain that movement poorly.

Banned in French primary schools since 1956, it continues to exist. Syntheses find an effect close to zero among the youngest and measurable in upper secondary.

Around age two, a child starts treating a stick as a telephone. That conduct is a solid marker; what it produces is far less established.

An association between a parenting practice and a child outcome may be produced by neither of them. Recent designs make it possible to test that.

A concern report and a referral to the prosecutor do not go to the same place and do not have the same effects. The confusion produces unusable figures.

Families do not choose at random between a nursery, a childminder and home care. Any direct comparison first measures that choice.

The order in which a child sits, crawls and then walks is remarkably constant. The ages at which they do so vary far more than is usually said.

A 2010 article showed that nearly all published work concerned a tiny fraction of humanity. The correction is under way, slowly.

France changed its organisation twice in five years. The data invoked on either side often bear on different questions.

The gap between mothers and fathers is narrowing slowly, but not in the way one imagines. The composition of tasks changes faster than their volume.

Counting hours puts a video call and a looping video in the same box. The most recent work shows this variable explains very little.

One hundred and twenty-three children, followed for forty years, supplied the central argument for investing in early childhood. The sample size is also the main objection.

It is the most widely ratified international treaty in the world. Its concrete legal reach varies sharply by country, and in France by which article is invoked.

The advised age for introducing certain foods was pushed back in the 2000s, then brought forward in the 2010s. The reversal rests on specific trials.

A child who waits fifteen minutes in front of a sweet was said to become a better-off adult. The 2018 replication greatly shrank that statement, without cancelling it.