A 9-year-old girl spent all day playing at a park near her home. She had a cell phone and a house key with her, and went home when she got tired. Was that dangerous? It sounds like typical behavior for a 9-year-old. But what if you knew she was there while her mother worked all day? Does that change anything about how dangerous her day at the park appears? An experiment shows that people don’t so much judge such a situation as dangerous because it’s objectivly dangerous, but because of how neglectful the parent appears. In fact, the morality of the reason a parent leaves a child unsupervised directly affects how dangerous the situation is perceived to be. Ashley Thomas, Kyle Stanford, and Barbara Sarnecka of the University of California at Irvine conducted an experiment that showed such bias.

To get at this question experimentally, Thomas and her collaborators created a series of vignettes in which a parent left a child unattended for some period of time, and participants indicated the risk of harm to the child during that period. For example, in one vignette, a 10-month-old was left alone for 15 minutes, asleep in the car in a cool, underground parking garage. In another vignette, an 8-year-old was left for an hour at a Starbucks, one block away from her parent's location.

To experimentally manipulate participants' moral attitude toward the parent, the experimenters varied the reason the child was left unattended across a set of six experiments with over 1,300 online participants. In some cases, the child was left alone unintentionally (for example, in one case, a mother is hit by a car and knocked unconscious after buckling her child into her car seat, thereby leaving the child unattended in the car seat). In other cases, the child was left unattended so the parent could go to work, do some volunteering, relax or meet a lover.

Not surprisingly, the parent's reason for leaving a child unattended affected participants' judgments of whether the parent had done something immoral: Ratings were over 3 on a 10-point scale even when the child was left unattended unintentionally, but they skyrocketed to nearly 8 when the parent left to meet a lover. Ratings for the other cases fell in between.

The researchers were motivated by an increasing number of parents who get into legal trouble for allowing their children to be unsupervised in situations that were once considered normal. The case of the 9-year-old girl was real, and her mother was arrested for child neglect. They talked about the research at NPR, and said the most surprising thing was how judgmental the participants were, and the most judgmental of all were mothers, who also overestimated the risk of danger the most. -via Digg

(Image credit: Flickr user Dave)

Imagine you are nine years old and you don’t feel at all confident about moving up to the fourth grade. You don’t know who your teacher is going to be, or what you’ll be doing this year. And then your parents get an email from your new teacher, and it’s a music video!

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New teacher Dwayne Reed sent a video to his incoming students to show them what the next year will be like for them. I can imagine that other Chicago fourth-graders are already envious. -via Tastefully Offensive

You can tell school is starting back when the kids begin trying to get out of going. This early in the year, they’re out of practice and not yet good at it. I had a child who was so deathly sick until about 9AM, then would perk up just fine, or at least enough to eat a greasy takeout lunch and watch TV. There were a couple of times I made her go to the second half of the school day. This is the latest from Lunarbaboon.

There's a perceptible change in attitude when you meet a stranger in public for the first time with your child in tow, and lately this change seems to be working out better for dads than moms.

For some reason people are quick to criticize mothers for the way they're raising their child yet see the father as a hero for spending time with his kids, overlooking the same stuff they just criticized the mom for.

This comic strip was written by Chaunie Brusie and loosely based on her experiences, but as we all know parental experiences may vary, so there's bound to be a dad getting dissed in public somewhere!

-Via Babble

It's hard for kids to be brave when they're faced with scary things like shots, barber shops and flying for the first time, but they're able to get through it all with support from their parents.

For some parents support means holding their child's hand, or wiping their tears away, but photographer Aaron Sheldon lent his son support by letting him dress up like an astronaut:

“The first shot we did in the project came about as my 4-year-old’s idea when I was helping him get over his fear of the doctors exam table. He decided to act brave like an astronaut and then asked if he could wear his spacesuit to his next appointment,”

It can be hard for parents to tell how their kids are going to turn out, and what kind of person they're going to be, when they're really young.

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But when they do something that shows they truly care, and their actions prove they've been listening to our life lessons all along, they make their parents proud.

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Generous, caring and thoughtful kids serve as a good example to the other children they meet, demonstrating how kids can make a difference in the world if they work at it.

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Of course some, like this 9-year-old who makes small, portable shelters for homeless people, will work a lot harder than others, but don't let your little ones get discouraged.

Because as long as they're thinking about the welfare of others they're on the right track!

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See Good Parenting Summed Up In 15+ Pics here

It’s a known fact that parents hate the cartoon Calliou because the title character is an unpleasant brat who whines and throws temper tantrums. My kids never watched the show, because I had already heard about it. Therefore, I don’t understand why other parents put up with it, when there are so many other children’s shows. I don’t know if Teletubbies is still available, but that was my favorite when my kids were preschoolers. Sesame Street was nice, too, although we probably watched more Disney movies on VHS than regular TV. This is the latest from Lunarbaboon.  

A bride and groom are repeating their wedding vows when those in attendance get a reason to pay attention.

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Yes, the flower girl stole the show, which is what you should expect when you put little children in the wedding party. It’s moments like these that make a wedding memorable. -via Tastefully Offensive

The following article is from Uncle John’s Factastic Bathroom Reader.

(Image credit: Flickr user Dave Herholz)

Babies: they’re even weirder than you thought.

1. They can’t taste salt. Babies are born with a well-developed sense of taste— but not for salt. Studies show that babies can’t taste salt until they’re about four months old. They can taste other flavors as well as adults can, especially sweet, bitter, and sour flavors (which might explain all the “baby tastes lemon” videos on YouTube)— and maybe even better: some studies indicate that babies actually have more taste buds than adults do.

2. They don’t shed tears. Babies cry an awful lot— but they can’t shed tears: they don’t have functional tear ducts until they’re between three and twelve weeks old. (They can, however, produce “basal tears”— the nonemotional tears we produce constantly to keep our eyes moist.)

3. They have no kneecaps.

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YouTube user RenoGeek and his son visited a children's museum. While there, the toddler tried to fill a wire mesh bucket with water. Unfortunately, the bucket was defective. It couldn't hold any water at all. I hope that he was able to get a refund for his admission ticket.

-via Tastefully Offensive

The explosion of the game Pokémon GO is leading to the inevitable: babies named after Pokémon. It’s not the first time someone’s done it, but the popularity of the name Eevee is growing, as well as Onix. Ash is also seen more often. There have been babies named Pikachu in Japan for years, and it may well happen in the U.S. soon, if it hasn’t already. These children will never be able to lie about their age. -via The Daily Dot

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Pretending to be interested in what other people have to say is an important life skill. Teach your kids by example, as they are trying to teach you. If successful, then we all learn how to fake sincerity as adults.

(Photo: Robert Franklin/South Bend Tribune)

This is Jason Haney, a construction manager working on a project for Memorial Hospital in South Bend, Indiana. He and his co-workers like to entertain the kids who look outside their windows. Last winter, they built a snowman. More recently, they decided to make a Waldo figure from the Where's Waldo? books.

Haney made the 8-foot tall figure from plywood and he and his daughter painted it. Haney and his co-workers hide it in the framework of the new building under construction until a kid spots it. Then they move Waldo somewhere else and start the game over.

(Photo: Hedi Prescott/Beacon Health System)

The South Bend Tribune reports that kids love it:

Arrihanna Williams, 7, and another child enjoyed watching as the crane above the hospital moved a big load of materials. When asked, Arrihanna was quick to point out where Waldo was standing from the playroom window.

Down the hall, 9-year-old Neveah Garza was in contact isolation and unable to leave her room. But her window overlooked the construction site and she enjoyed watching the men at work.

“Poor guys, they have to work in the sun,” she said.

In the past, she’s hunted for Waldo in library books and on an online site, she said, explaining how that worked. But it was a bit of a challenge to find the character at the building site.

“Mom found him first,” she said, pointing down at the site. “See he’s down there, by that fan thingy.”

-via Nerd Approved

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A fun-size human appeared just outside the polar bear enclosure at the St. Louis Zoo in Missouri. It was the perfect snack. So the polar bear dove into the water and tried to snatch him. Alas, the glass got in the way. Keep trying! 

-via Telegraph

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I grew up around a bunch of latchkey kids who walked themselves home from school every day and often had to make their own dinner because their parent(s) were always working.

This seemed quite normal, and made it easy to find kids to play with after school, but nowadays most parents wouldn't dream of letting their kids live that latchkey life.

Which brings up the question- when is a kid old enough to be left home alone?

This chart created by Thirty Handmade Days attempts to answer that question, breaking it down by age group and showing which states have laws against leaving kids home alone.

It seems a bit ridiculous to worry about leaving a 16-17 year old home alone, but what do you think- do you agree with this chart?

-Via CountryLiving