Everyone's engaged in the Lab School's Pecan Room. Fledgling engineers debate the construction of a block tower. Bookworms explore bright pictures unfolded on laps. Clothing tie-dyers fiddle with the gigantic plastic mitts covering hands. Artists converse while snipping florescent straws with blunt scissors.
This week—on November 22, 2016—U.S. Secretary of Education John B. King Jr. asked states to reconsider corporal punishment in public schools, noting that this form of discipline "is harmful, ineffective, and often disproportionately applied to students of color and students with disabilities."
A recent policy report by associate professor of human development and family sciences Elizabeth Gershoff showed that corporal punishment is not practiced with an even hand in the nearly half of the states where it remains legal. Gershoff and colleague Sarah Font analyzed 160,000 cases of corporal punishment from the 2013-2014 school year and found that children who are African American, have disabilities, or are male are more likely to be hit.
Young adults who live with their parents find that their relationships feel more tense, with higher highs and lower lows. But they are no worse off as a result of these daily experiences than young adults living elsewhere, according to a new study from The University of Texas at Austin.
New research from The University of Texas at Austin shows that children adjust more poorly when parents react negatively in direct response to their child's crying, fussing and other aversive behavior than if the parent is negative in general. Children who routinely experience negative backlash from a parent are also less successful at navigating social situations.
Human Development and Family Sciences professor emeritus Karrol Kitt—vibrant, incisive, and perpetually poised to act—can distill her 38 years on campus into a metaphor that would be familiar to students who have taken her personal finance course. There, she talked about "the three-legged stool" approach to saving for retirement (stocks, bonds and cash), and now she says: "If my career were a stool, the three legs would include insurance regulation, student affairs, and education and research. I've had a wonderful career."
