Students from the Eliot K-8 Innovation School sat in an empty office building on March 14, waiting for the arrival of Mayor Thomas Menino and for the cameras to roll. Bouquets of colorful helium balloons livened up the space, which was also filling with expectant adults and news media assembling for an announcement: This North End waterfront building will become the city’s newest Boston Public School. The happy atmosphere was appropriate to an undeniably positive development for families in the northern reaches of Boston.  While the city says the new school should open in 2016 to serve about …

If your image of a mom-and-pop shop doesn’t quite match Tadpole, then you and David Hauck are of the same mind.  Mr. Hauck is half of the husband-and-wife team that owns the “modern children’s store” on Clarendon Street. But he’s not exactly the little old guy manning the register, and his business is no crowded hole in the wall. Yet as longtime transplants to Boston who feel grounded in a neighborhood they love, and have built both successful work and home lives around it, this mom and pop – Storey Hieronymus Hauck and David Hauck – have created a version of the American dream here, right in…

“A student has to be a valedictorian – or bring a gun to school – in order to be considered newsworthy,” says Amika Kemmler-Ernst.  An educator for more than 40 years, she’s talking about our tendency to focus on either the great or the horrible, while paying less attention to everything in between. A teacher of children and a mentor to teachers, Dr. Kemmler-Ernst is now officially retired.  But in an ongoing visual ethnography project, she’s been visiting Boston Public Schools (BPS) and taking pictures of normal kids in action, learning at school. It’s a passion she’s indulged in throughout …

Stray whole-grain muffin crumbs are no match for the teachers at the Curley K-8 School in Jamaica Plain. Dustbusters in hand, they cope with the aftermath of the breakfast that’s served in their classrooms every day. The Universal Free Breakfast program began district-wide in Boston in September, and the Curley’s staff is just one group of adults who’ve converted to the idea of mixing yogurt with notebooks in the morning, to benefit students beyond having full tummies. Improvements in behavior, diet, and achievement have all been tracked in more than 15 years of research on learning and …

Give a boy a watch and send him out the door: After her 10-year-old leaves the house, Katherine Ozment may not see her son again until he reads his wrist and knows it’s dinnertime. Today, she’s fine with that. But one year ago, Ms. Ozment was just coming to terms with her parental hovering habits. Going out to play meant dressing everyone for the weather, packing snacks and water, mom loading the baby into the stroller – a real group activity. Her intense monitoring of her three kids’ every mood and management of their days was, as she wrote, “changing the very nature of their childhood.” So …

Our citywide angst over the education of Boston’s children caught a break this week, with the good-news results for Massachusetts from an international study of mathematics and science achievement. The ray of sunshine in these parts is that Massachusetts eighth graders scored second highest in the world on the science portion of the TIMSS, the 2011 Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study. Just Singapore’s scores were higher.  In math, the Commonwealth ranked sixth behind South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Japan. The test, taken by 600,000 eighth graders worldwide, is…

“You’re just like Sophia!” Slap. Right there on the street, I hit my child. On her face, with my hand, in the heat of the moment, my temper the winner, my daughter the loser. We were walking home after school: three bulging backpacks, a stroller, and two siblings arguing in the rain. Eldest daughter was trying to get me to react to her complaint about her sister combatant. When I didn’t respond, she said a desperate thing – she compared me to the girl in her world who’s been best friend and foe and everything in between. After I’d spent the day trying not to worry so much about this child of …

My kids’ crib is embarrassingly languishing in our den – despite the fact that it hasn’t been used as a sleeping place in a very long time.   Our Bumbo baby seat has stuck around too, although it was useful for mere months, since it’s meant just for the baby who’s learning to sit up. And can I add our Maclaren stroller to this list? We have one of about a million of them sold in the U.S. from 1999 through November 2009. None of these items were exceptionally well-loved or well-used, but they served their time and I’m more than ready to see them go.  Yet they were all recalled, which adds a …

Who are the "good guys" in your house? The Republicans, or Democrats? In this presidential election year, when our former governor is fighting for the White House and the senate race in Massachusetts has a sharp national profile, the air is thick with politics. Like secondhand smoke or background TV, after months of exposure to ads and grown-up conversations, our children have likely absorbed opinions in all shades of red and blue. But with just about a month to go (whew), do your kids know which side mom and dad are on? Perhaps if they are very young, you’ve been able to confine their media …

Ann Romney’s blanket of love, her speech at last week’s Republican National Convention, was an appeal to women voters that warmed hearts with her talk of a deep love for her husband, their very real marriage, and Americans’ shared love of country. But on Day One of their convention in Charlotte, N.C., the Democrats took that language of love and used it to support gay rights and the freedom to love whomever you please. Love wasn’t mentioned in the keynote or by speakers whose job it was to focus on single issues such as healthcare or the economy. But according to the Democratic National …

You couldn’t blame anyone outside our fair Commonwealth for thinking that we’ve pushed the needle high on the wacky-o-meter lately, all of it having to do with what we’re feeding ourselves. Menino vs. Chick-fil-A For sure, we’ve had more than enough of a certain chicken sandwich by now. Happily going without them for years, there isn’t a Chick-fil-A franchise anywhere in Boston. Yet for the past three weeks, the two have been inextricably linked. In July, when the company’s president, Dan Cathy, publicly reiterated his longstanding anti-gay marriage stance, Mayor Thomas Menino's wrote to him…

It’s the kind of hunger you wish to see more of: a child’s desire to improve, learn more, maybe even be the best. A fire in the belly to achieve – not the kind that’s sated with a cracker.  At my house, the demand is more about handfuls of Goldfish than craving sailing or swimming lessons, some impulses we’d welcome. But the 2012 Olympic Games could change all that. As we turn on the TV this week to close-ups of determined faces and stories of how the Olympic athletes got there, I’m hoping a little inspiration leaks out of the tube and into my kids. They may be weak in their genetic gifts for…

I’m being terrorized by a machete-wielding, three-year-old child: There are pictures of him in my head, working in his Amazon habitat, helping around the house, practicing cutting wood. His six-year-old neighbor is there too. She’s on an expedition away from her own family; cleaning camp, fishing for dinner, and preparing meals for an entire group of people. These accomplished children are the latest images of childhood competing with my own family, leaving me breathless as I discover what parenting mistakes I’m making today. Should I be a Chinese Tiger Mom? Or more Français? Am I …

Forget the truck, the barn jacket, the Cosmo centerfold: Nothing about Sen. Scott Brown has appealed to me as much as what he’s doing in his new TV commercials, cooking and cleaning at home.  I’ve seen the “Dad” and “Husband” ads repeatedly, and maybe because I don’t watch much TV (not because I shun it, I’m just too disorganized to fit it in), I’m drawn to watching every time, usually while I’m doing the dishes myself: Brown wears a T-shirt and eyeglasses, looking more homey than senatorial. He’s stirring up something in the kitchen, he takes clothes out of the dryer; he gives his wife a …

Dear Syd, It’s 10:30 p.m., you’re finally asleep and we’re both exhausted, but I think you’re bully-proofed for tomorrow. I was worried about the stomachache you said lasted all day yesterday. So I spoke with the doctor and went over some ideas with you after school: drink plenty of water, keep a pain diary, a food diary. Walking home on a humid, cool, green afternoon, we chuckled about that.  But another diary may be in order. You were acting rather helpless at bedtime, preferring mom’s full turn-down service to a quick goodnight wish a couple of minutes later. I was trying to settle in for …

Did you know that all magazine covers contain the words “hot” or “sex?” Of course, they don’t.  But my second-grader believes it is true. Just one glossy Boston freebie lying on our coffee table was used to make her point. While we keep few of the fashion mags and supermarket rags that are the focus of her headline criticism, she sees and hears enough, just from being out in the world. She knows that “sex” not only refers to gender, but to something that she’s too young to feel comfortable knowing about yet. And “hot” often has nothing to do with the weather. So, as long as we were onto …

When you’re a member of the audience, you hope to outnumber the performers.  An empty venue is disheartening for those on stage and there’s less energy in the room.  Boston Public Schools (BPS) took the stage on a rainy Tuesday night, holding its latest community meeting on improving school choice. But with fewer than two dozen people attending, speakers included – we barely made it. Go ahead, you can yawn – “community meeting on improving school choice” is one boring string of words, and not an event destined to be standing room only. But I was wide-eyed, thinking of the immense task Mayor …

When it’s just a carton of milk you need, a 35-mile drive is definitely out of the way. But if you’re up for a pilgrimage, the new Wegmans in Northborough is New England’s largest supermarket and the chain’s first store in Massachusetts.  There is some psychology behind wanting to see 138,000 square feet of produce and everything else the modern American grocery sells, in a box so big that there are 30 check-out lines and a red phone right by the yogurt case, connecting you to customer service – just in case you get lost, or have a question. But it’s not just me: Wegmans’ reputation for …

Stay in your lane, pass on the left and neither exceed nor fall under the speed limit: These are the unspoken traffic rules at Boston’s Prudential Center mall. Crowded with office workers, tourists, and locals, the busy hall off Boylston Street reminds you that you are still in the city. But pass the north-side main drag, and the aisles widen while the lovely skylight ceilings persist. Ahhh, space. It’s here that young families are making the mall their own. A landscaped garden, places indoors to linger, and now a family-oriented trio of businesses are all holding down the age of the average …

Squinting into the distance, I search for my 10-year-old. With rolling backpack in tow, she’s walking ahead of me after school. The meandering pace of her little sibling was slowing us down, and big sister was eager to get homework started. “Mom, can I go home by myself?” The leash lengthens as a child grows, and that day I let it out some more. So with plenty of daylight left, I handed her the keys. My daughter is a different color, shape, and size than Trayvon Martin, the 17-year-old boy in Florida who was fatally shot by a man on a neighborhood watch five weeks ago. But fear of harm done …