The Parent Portal Weekly

That running commentary your four-year-old keeps up while doing a jigsaw puzzle is not babbling. It is their brain learning to think. Research shows 78 per cent of children perform better on tasks when they talk themselves through it - and telling them to be quiet might be the worst thing we can do.

A study that followed children from age three into their mid-twenties found the strongest early predictor of how well they were doing at 25 wasn't their reading or their school. It was whether they had been given household chores from around age three or four.

The Harvard Grant Study followed 268 men for 75 years. When the researchers looked at what predicted a good adulthood, two things stood out. One was being loved. The other was something most families have quietly stopped asking their children to do.

Ask a five-year-old how they feel when their tower falls down and you'll get 'bad'. Two decades of research on emotional granularity suggests the size of a child's feeling vocabulary changes the feelings themselves - and the gap shows up far later than anyone expected.

Sweden spent a decade filling classrooms with tablets. Then reading scores dropped and they changed their minds. The research on what happens in a child's brain when they pick up a pencil might explain why.

For a decade Sweden pushed tablets into every classroom and sent the printed textbooks into storage. Then a reading score dropped, a brain study came out of Norway, and the whole experiment went into reverse.

A decade of research now shows that green space around schools changes how children's brains develop - not metaphorically, but structurally. The children with the least access to it are the ones the evidence says need it most.

Reading is only 5,000 years old. There's no genetic programme for it. When your child struggles to sound out words, their brain is attempting something evolution never planned for - and understanding that changes everything.

Everyone says AI is just like the Industrial Revolution - machines replaced muscle, now they replace minds, but new jobs will appear. It's a comforting comparison. It's also wrong, and the difference matters.

Times tables speed, counting, quick arithmetic - none of them predict long-term maths ability. What does is something most parents would never guess: whether your child can imagine the world through someone else's eyes.