Ages 8-12

/Ages 8-12

Summer Camp Info

Hard to imagine as frigid temperatures and snow continue to plague us on the East Coast and elsewhere around the nation, but now is the time to focus on Summer Camps. If you are interested in finding out about summer camp options, don't wait any longer to start your research, as Summer Camp research and sign-up season is well [...]

Raising “Soft” Sons in a Hard World

Ted Wells’ report to the NFL on the Jonathan Martin/Miami Dolphins harassment case presents Martin as an NFL rookie who was tormented both by his teammates and his own inability to fight back. As New York Times columnist Bill Rhoden notes in his column about the report, found here, “The question that repeatedly came to my mind as I [...]

Resolve to Stay Involved With Your Son’s School

As the new year begins, it is a great time to focus on being involved at your children's school. Here at GCP we can't say enough about the importance of parental involvement in schools. See, for example, our earlier posts "Back to School for Parents", September 13, 2011 and "Parents Resolve to Get More Involved in 2012", January 2, [...]

Tips for Encouraging Thankfulness

With Thanksgiving but a few days away, we focus on gathering with our families and being thankful. In preparation for the holiday, children are encouraged in school to think about what they are thankful for, and often families will encourage everyone around the table to say what they are thankful for as they sit down to dinner. But what [...]

How To Let Boys Be Boys

Any parent of a boy and a girl will quickly tell you that there are many developmental differences between the sexes that are evident almost from birth (apart from the obvious physical ones). We recently ran across an interesting article from Eleanor Reynolds, author of a series of books on guiding young children, which suggests that mothers should acknowledge [...]

“Is My Son in Trouble?” Tips for the Tough Parent-Teacher Conference

Navigating those parent teacher conferences for our sons in the lower grades can be really stressful if there are behavior issues to discuss. We ran across these helpful tips for a successful parent teacher conference for parents of younger children with behavior issues from "What Did My Son Do Now?", an article in Early Childhood News, and want to [...]

Veterans Day Activities for Your Children

Today is Veterans Day, a day to thank and honor all who served (or still serve) in the military. Whether your children have the day off from school is a function of your state or local school district (with no legal requirement that schools close on Veterans Day, individual states or school districts are free to establish their own [...]

What Should We Tell Our Boys About Trayon Christian?

As you probably know if you've been paying attention to the news recently, Trayon Christian is a 19 year old Black college student who is suing the NYPD and Barney's--one of NYC's luxury department stores--for wrongful arrest after he purchased a $350 Ferragamo belt in the store using a debit card. Christian was stopped by police as he tried [...]

Give Your Child a Head Start on Life: Tune In, Talk More, and Take Turns

Did you know that the number of words a child is exposed to between ages 0-3 is significantly related to that child’s ultimate intellectual and academic success? Studies have shown that the more parents talk to their children, the faster children’s vocabularies grow and the higher the children’s IQ test scores are at age three and later.   These studies have [...]

Diversity Matters: American Promise and ISDN

Greetings GCP'ers! Today we focus on several opportunities to examine and explore the impact of race on our sons' education. American Promise: We hope by now you have heard about "American Promise", the Sundance Grand Jury prize winning documentary which follows the journeys of two African-American boys and their families from kindergarten through high school graduation. (Check out our [...]