You can't buy your 10-year-old daughter a smart phone because you are scared of her becoming a social outcast. Sometimes as the parent, you have to make the hard decisions and be the backbone. But you need to be confident in your decision,and to do that you have to think it through and discuss it.

It's possible for children to have smart phones and not become addicted, which means they can use theirs smartphones reasonably. They can have one and also read a lot and even play outside. It's not black or white. You may ask me what I would do as a parent. I have never been addicted to technology, but I don't refuse it. I haven't and wouldn't buy my daughter a smartphone,but I have given her my old ones with rules attached. And it's important for parent to understand their children's phones and how they work. But parental decisions made with no discussion don't harvest respect and understanding, only hostility. And there will be the seeds of anger later .

It's interesting that you see the smartphone as more of an issue than social media. I am the opposite. A smartphone can be an amazing tool to help your children communicate with others and discover new things , but it can also become a tool that brings school life and its problems home.That's what I would oppose most because we all need switch-off time. Think of some rules for using smartphones, but they need to be discussed and work for you. For example, no phones upstairs, minimal use at home,no social media sites, or only certain, no independent app-buying,etc. A smartphone shouldn't be a byword for"do what you want".

This will be the first of many things your daughter feels passionate(热情的) about and you may not agree with. She needs to listen to you and you also need to listen to her. As an adult,you are in charge and are supposed to build a good relationship with her. And it's your job to take the long view at times when her vision can see only what's right in front of her.

For top students from low-income families, applying to colleges is particularly difficult. One approach makes this whole process easier? Provide an adviser for them.

That's the idea behind CollegePoint, a program to help gifted students go to schools that match their intelligence. When a high school student takes a standardized test—the PSAT, SAT or ACT—and they score in the 90th percentile, and their families make less than $ 80, 000 a year, they get an email from the program offering them a free adviser. The advisers listen, guide and answer students' questions.

Connor Rechtzigel, an adviser in Minnesota, sees the importance of his role, for research shows that low-income students are far more likely to undermatch because they don't think they have what it takes to get in and because many don't even know what schools are out there. He helped high school senior Justice Benjamin, the first in his family to apply to college, thinking about what his ideal learning experience was. Finally, Justice narrowed in on smaller schools where he could study environmental science and made his final choice: Skidmore College in New York.

Figuring out how to pay for college is a major part of what CollegePoint advisers do. Nakhle, an adviser in North Carolina, is working with Hensley, an Ohio high school senior who can't get extra financial help from her family. They spent a lot of time comparing and analyzing her financial-aid award letters, which made her decision much clearer. Finally, the Ohio State University offered an option where she would pay nothing. Staying in-state wasn't her first choice, but it was the best option for her.

On average, American kids ages 3 to 12 spent 29 hours a week in school, eight hours more that they did in 1981. They also did more household work and participated in more of such organized activities as soccer and ballet (芭蕾舞). Involvement in sports, in particular, rose almost 50% from 1981 to 1997: boys now spend an average of four hours a week playing sports; girls log half that time. All in all, however, children’s leisure time dropped from 40% of the day in 1981 to 25%

“Children are affected by the same time crunch (危机) that affects their parents,” says Sandra Hofferth, who headed the recent study of children’s timetable. A chief reason, she says, is that more mothers are working outside the home. (Nevertheless, children in both double-income and “male breadwinner” households spent comparable amounts of time interacting with their parents 19 hours and 22 hours respectively. In contrast, children spent only 9 hours with their single mothers.)

All work and no play could make for some very messed-up kids. “Play is the most powerful way a child explores the world and learns about himself,” says T. Berry Brazelton, professor at Harvard Medical School Unstructured(unorganized)play encourages independent thinking and allows the young to handle their relationships with their peers, but kids ages 3 to 12 spent only 12 hours a week engaged in it.

The children sampled spent a quarter of their rapidly decreasing “free time” watching television. But that, believe it or not, was one of the findings parents might regard as good news. If they’re spending less time in front of the TV set, however, kids aren’t replacing it with reading. Despite efforts to get kids more interested in books, the children spent just over an hour a week reading. Let’s face it, who’s got the time?