Time spent with children is crucial to their early development.

Researchers have known for years that first-born children are more likely to end up better educated and better paid than their later-born siblings.
Now, thanks to a recent study by the US Brigham Young University economics professor Joseph Price published in Journal of Human Resources, there’s a clearer explanation of why that’s so, reported Sltrib.com.
First-born children are also first in line to claim the majority of their parents’ time. And time spent with children, it’s well known, is crucial to their early development and subsequent growth into successful, thriving adults.
It’s not that parents spend less time with their younger children on purpose. Rather, parents tend to spend less quality time with their children as the family ages, Price found.
Parents wishing to treat all their children equally have two choices, he said. They can either space the birth of their children closer together in time, or make a conscious effort not to lose stamina while raising their children over the years.
“If you’re at that stage when your kids are a little older, your inclination is to watch a movie with them, but that’s also a disservice to your younger children,“ Price said.
He added, “But when your first-born child was 4 you probably spent time reading to that child or playing or talking. This should remind us of the fact of how important we are as parents.“
Price warns that parents who think they can escape this tendency by limiting themselves to just one child are mistaken.
Only children aged 4 to 5 end up spending less time with their parents, on average between 90 minutes per day with the father and 116 minutes per day with the mother, than do parents with two children.
In that situation the father spends 115 minutes per day on average with his children, while the mother spends an average of 177 minutes per day with her two children.
The research is significant because it lends an understanding to what causes birth order differences, Sandra Black, co-editor of Journal of Human Resources said in a statement. The study’s findings summarized as following:
*First-born children get about 3,000 more hours of quality time with their parents between ages 4 and 13 than the next sibling gets when they pass through the same age range.
* Not only do parents spend less total time with children as the family ages, but more of that time is spent on activities not considered to be “quality“ time, such as watching TV.
* The youngest child gets about the same amount of quality time whether the family is large or small.
Parents of large families devote more overall quality time to their children, so the youngest of four siblings ends up with as much quality time as the younger of two siblings.

Growing numbers of children say they are carrying knives and bottles to defend themselves against bullies and are afraid of being stabbed at school, according to a report.
Media coverage of children and young people being shot or stabbed in towns or cities, together with a fear that serious bullying is becoming more common, are creating a climate of fear in some schools, the research by Roger Morgan, the Children’s Rights Director, suggests, reported Timesonline.co.uk.
Dr. Morgan said that where bullying was once considered to be restricted to the playground, children now felt affected by it outside the school gates and on the street.
“Young people tell me they believe there is an increasing number of other young people carrying weapons in order to defend themselves. As a result, many themselves say they have carried a weapon or have considered doing so themselves out of a fear of violence on the streets or at school,“ he said.
The report said: “Bullying could develop into rape, attacks on the street, and mugging to steal money for drugs. It could also end up with people being stabbed and shot on the streets, and gangs attacking the families of their victims.
“Whether or not we call these things bullying or crimes, we were told that they are increasing, and that young people are getting more worried about them. One group decided that these crimes can only be called bullying if they are against someone the attacker already knows.“
Another serious concern for children questioned for the study was cyber-bullying through mobile phones and websites, which appeared to be increasing and had affected four in ten young people.
Children were particularly concerned about having embarrassing photographs taken of them on mobile phones and then circulated via the internet or mobile phones, and “happy slapping“, in which attacks are filmed.

Kenyan children playing football.

It is a hot, humid afternoon and the children of Nairobi’s Mathare slum are once again playing football and trying to put behind the tribal violence that nearly tore them apart.
Like many other kids across Kenya, these children aged 12 to 18 were caught up in the turmoil that erupted after disputed presidential polls in late December.
But unlike their counterparts, the children of Mathare are unique in that they are products of a local sports association which has helped thousands of children in the sprawling slum of about 300,000 people since it was created in 1987.
Nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2003, the Mathare Youth Sports Association (MYSA) has pioneered the linking of sports with social improvement and community development activities such as the cleaning of the slums, according to AFP.
Drawn from different tribes, the children have also put Kenya on the international football map when they won the first FIFA street football World Cup in Germany in 2006.
It is against this background of being society builders that the children of Mathare survived the trauma of the inter-tribal clashes between the Luos and Kikuyus in late December.
Tens of thousands of families were displaced in the violence in Mathare and 182 children registered in the football club went missing.
MYSA’s sports project officer Stephen Muchoki acknowledged his association was hard hit as it draws its members from all the communities residing in the slum.
“We suffered most from the displacements,“ he said.
Some of the children and their families sought protection at the Mathare police station where officers decided to allow matches at a nearby pitch and, more importantly, provide security during the games.
Working with the information from their membership lists, MYSA officials managed to trace the missing children to tent camps and churches where they were living after their homes were burned to the ground.
It is not the first time that the two communities have fought each other on tribal lines in the impoverished district.
But officials said the ongoing African Nations Cup tournament in Ghana has served as a big unifying factor.
“The tournament could not have come at a better time,“ said MYSA director Peter Karanja.
“The children come together in small kiosks to watch the matches and cheer the opposing sides. It diverts their attention. It’s truly a healing process.“

A child with her kite in the Iranian city of Ahvaz in Khuzestan province.

Kids who live in neighborhoods with heavy traffic pollution have lower IQs and score worse on other tests of intelligence and memory than children who breathe cleaner air, a new study shows.
The effect of pollution on intelligence was similar to that seen in children whose mothers smoked 10 cigarettes a day while pregnant, or in kids who have been exposed to lead, Dr. Shakira Franco Suglia of the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston, the study’s lead author, told Reuters Health.
While the effect of pollution on cardiovascular and respiratory health has been studied extensively, less is known about how breathing dirty air might affect the brain, Suglia and her team wrote in the American Journal of Epidemiology.

A recent survey showed Japanese 15-year-olds fell to sixth place from second among 57 countries in science.

Japanese schoolchildren will spend more time on core subjects such as math and science under guidelines, in an effort to boost academic standards months after the country slipped in global education rankings.
The changes, to be implemented gradually from next year, reverse reforms implemented in 2000 to create a more “relaxed“ environment that would foster creativity and reduce rote learning.
A survey published in December showed Japanese 15-year-olds fell to sixth place from second among 57 countries in science, to 10th place from sixth in maths and to 15th from 14th in reading.
The new guidelines, which Kyodo news agency said would be formalized in March after a period of public comment, would also strengthen “moral education“ but stopped short of making ethics a formal classroom subject, as many conservatives had advocated.
“Many people recognize the need for ethics education,“ Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda told reporters. “There are various ways to do this even without making it a formal subject.“
The guidelines call for bolstering education on Japanese traditions and culture in all subjects, including study of traditional instruments and compulsory martial arts like judo and kendo in middle school.
Foreign-language studies would also be compulsory in primary school.

One in 10 Scottish teenagers over the age of 16 is now taking cocaine as the cost of the illegal drug has fallen following record harvests in South America.
The extent of the cocaine crisis among youth is revealed in two surveys compiled by police and by drugs, health and education experts for the Scottish government.
Police chiefs are also warning that a combination of cheap cocaine and alcohol is putting a new generation at risk of serious health problems, reported Scotlandonsunday.scotsman.com.
Scotland has the third-highest cocaine usage of any country in Europe and experts fear the situation will only get worse as more and more youngsters start experimenting with the illegal drug.

The UN children’s fund appealed for $237 million (193 million euros) in aid for children in 10 conflict-torn countries in Africa, a region it said proved difficult to raise money for.
The 2008 appeal for emergency assistance particularly targets the Democratic Republic of Congo and Chad, both deeply poor countries which have recently witnessed major clashes--and whose aid needs UNICEF estimates at roughly $106 million and $45 million, respectively, reported AFP.
Congo, Ivory Coast, Guinea, Liberia, Mauritania, Niger and the Central African Republic are also on the agency’s list.
Last year, only half the money UNICEF hoped to raise for seven African countries came through--in stark contrast to Asia, where mobilizing emergency assistance is much easier, according to Esther Guluma, UNICEF’s director for west and central Africa.
“That’s unfortunately not the case for Africa,“ she said.
UNICEF is separately appealing for $105 million in aid for the crisis in Darfur, Sudan.
The call coincides with a new report by the children’s agency, warning that 1.4 million children under five in Africa’s Sahel region do not have enough to eat, roughly a quarter of whom suffer from severe malnutrition.
“We want to save the lives of these children before emergency situations occur,“ Guluma said.

Across
1-A......clears the streets from the snow.
2-A comb has many.......
3-students sit on........in the classroom.

Down
4-The opposite of inside is......
5-The plural of man is......