On the Web we all become small-town visitors lost in the big city.

The best scientific way to discover if one factor influences another is to do a controlled experiment.

Becoming an adult means leaving the world of your parents and starting to make your way toward the future that you will share with your peers.

If parents are the fixed stars in the childs universe, the vaguely understood, distant but constant celestial spheres, siblings are the dazzling, sometimes scorching comets whizzing nearby.

Philosophers and psychologists have long puzzled over the question of how we know as much as we do despite our limited experiences. One way is to see how children learn. Another example is consciousness. The concept is usually explored by armchair academics. Looking at kids expands our conceptions of consciousness.

We're in a culture where everything is either consumption or production, so child care is either a very, very bad-paying form of work or a very expensive luxury that you purchase. There isn't a good place in our picture of the world for what caregiving is about. Even teenage babysitters have sort of disappeared from the scene.

From an evolutionary perspective children are, literally, designed to learn. Childhood is a special period of protected immaturity. It gives the young breathing time to master the things they will need to know in order to survive as adults.