Back-to-school is always a time when parents and teachers revisit what is important for children and how to best support their positive development.
This popular list of back-to-school articles has been updated annually for almost 15 years, archived in the 2026-27 school year.
Listed by category, you’ll find almost 50 articles that cover learning and achievement; school belonging, motivation, and engagement; family well-being; and much more.
For big picture thinking about positive youth development at back-to-school time, check out the series for parents: Successful Kids Need 8 Core Abilities: How to Parent with Purpose.
Learning & Achievement
Parents Have Way More Influence Than They Realize in Shaping Their Children’s Success
Jenny Anderson and Rebecca Winthrop, The Hechinger Report, 2025
An excellent lead selection. It explains why conversation, encouragement, and attention to children’s interests matter more than direct homework supervision—especially with adolescents.
Why One Reading Expert Says “Just-Right” Books Are All Wrong
Jill Barshay, KQED MindShift/The Hechinger Report, 2025
Challenges the widespread practice of restricting children to books at their assessed reading level.
How Can Subtle Language Shifts Unlock Student Potential?
Nimah Gobir, KQED MindShift, 2025
Shows how describing children as writers, scientists, teachers, and problem-solvers can encourage agency and competence.
Small Wins: The Key to Student Motivation
Cathleen Beachboard, Edutopia, 2025
A practical discussion of progress, intrinsic motivation, and why breaking difficult work into manageable steps helps learners persist.
What If SEL Were About Making the World a Better Place?
Aakash Chowkase, Greater Good Magazine, 2025
Expands SEL beyond individual coping and self-management to include social responsibility and collective well-being.
Students Are Feeling Burned Out. Here’s How You Can Help
Ryan Nagelhout, Harvard Graduate School of Education, 2024
Helps parents understand the academic, extracurricular, social, and digital pressures contributing to adolescent burnout.
A Shared Language for Positive Youth Development, by Marilyn Price-Mitchell, PhD. at Roots of Action. Helps parents, educators, and students develop a simple language to help build young people’s strengths, 2026.
School Belonging, Motivation, and Engagement
How Classroom Rituals Help Create Community, by Emily Brower at Greater Good Magazine.
Explores how small, repeated classroom practices create belonging, emotional safety, resilience, and academic engagement.
How Schools Are Countering Absenteeism With Food, Rides, and Individual Notes, by Jill Barshay at KQED MindShift/The Hechinger Report.
A thoughtful look at chronic absenteeism that moves beyond blaming students or parents and examines the practical and relational barriers keeping children out of school.
Can Educators Focus on Connection Rather Than Grades?, by Christina Swanson at Greater Good Magazine.
Shows how personalized, relationship-centered feedback can improve confidence and engagement while reducing students’ preoccupation with grades.
Family Well-Being & Purposeful Parenting
Why Parental Stress Isn’t Just About the Parent
Joanne Chen, Greater Good Magazine, 2025
Makes a strong, research-based case that caring for parents’ well-being supports children rather than competing with their needs.
How Parents Influence Their Children’s Goals
Joanne Chen, Greater Good Magazine, 2025
An article that distinguishes extrinsic goals—status, wealth, and image—from goals rooted in relationships, growth, and contribution.
Five Tips for Nurturing Your Children’s Values
Andrew J. Fuligni and Maryam Abdullah, Greater Good Magazine, 2025
Connects values development to relationships, modeling, family identity, and meaningful contribution.
Why Parents Are Lonely and How They Can Connect
Joanne Chen, Greater Good Magazine, 2025
Broadens “family well-being” to include the social support parents themselves need.
How Moments in Nature Help Kids Thrive
Deborah Farmer Kris, Greater Good Magazine, 2025
A refreshing counterbalance to achievement and technology articles, connecting nature with attention, creativity, health, and emotional regulation.
Family-School Engagement
The Case for Strong Family and Community Engagement in Schools
Emily Boudreau, Harvard Graduate School of Education
Although published in 2023, this remains one of the clearest contemporary explanations of engagement as a genuine partnership rather than parent attendance or volunteering.
5 Culturally Responsive Family Engagement Strategies
Steven M. Constantino, Edutopia, 2024
Explains why effective engagement begins with listening, trust, accessibility, and respect for families’ knowledge.
3 Instructional Shifts to Facilitate Student-Led Learning
Paul Emerich France, Edutopia, 2024
Especially interesting for its student-led approach to communicating learning and progress to families.
Adolescence and Growing Independence
10 Parenting Tips for Preteens and Tweens, by Juliann Garey; clinically reviewed by Laura Kirmayer, PhD, and Catherine Steiner-Adair, EdD, at the Child Mind Institute, 2025.
Helps parents understand that turning toward friends and seeking distance from parents are normal developmental movements—not rejection or deliberate defiance.
Maintaining Emotional Boundaries as a Parent, by the Child Mind Institute, 2026.
Discusses children’s needs for privacy and autonomy, parents’ appropriate limits, and the risks of trying to control a child’s thoughts or feelings.
Raising Confident, Independent Children, by Harold S. Koplewicz, MD, at the Child Mind Institute, 2024.
Introduces parental scaffolding: providing enough structure for safety and growth while allowing children to take risks, solve problems, and experience occasional failure.
Neurodiversity and Learning Differences
What Is Neurodiversity?
Caroline Miller; clinical review by Cynthia Martin, PsyD, and Stephanie A. Lee, PsyD, Child Mind Institute, updated 2026
A balanced introduction that recognizes neurodivergent strengths without minimizing conditions that may require support.
How Gender Norms Shape Our Perception of ADHD in Children
Nimah Gobir, KQED MindShift, 2025
Shows how adults’ expectations about boys and girls can influence whose ADHD is noticed, misunderstood, or missed.
Neurodivergent Kids and Screen Time
Katherine Martinelli; clinical review by Cynthia Martin, PsyD, and Dave Anderson, PhD, Child Mind Institute, 2026
More nuanced than standard screen-time advice because it considers the ways technology can help neurodivergent children regulate, learn, and connect.
Young Kids With and Without Disabilities Can Learn Side by Side. One State Has Instead Kept Them Apart for Years
Joanna Broder, The Hechinger Report, 2025
A compelling examination of inclusion and the assumptions that lead schools to separate children with disabilities.
Youth Sports
Project Play Survey: 11% of Sports Parents Believe Their Child Can Go Pro
Jon Solomon, Aspen Institute Project Play, 2025
A useful reality check on athletic expectations, college scholarships, specialization, and the odds of elite competition.
Most Sports Parents Believe Specialization Is Appropriate
Jon Solomon, Aspen Institute Project Play, 2025
Explores why specialization pressure now begins well before college recruitment—and sometimes simply to make a high-school team.
Family Spending on Youth Sports Rises 46% Over Five Years
Jon Solomon, Aspen Institute Project Play, 2025
Raises important questions about commercialization, family sacrifice, access, and equity in youth sports.
Friendship, Belonging, and Bullying
How to Help Kids Who Are Lonely, by Rachel Ehmke; clinically reviewed by Lauren Allerhand, PsyD, and Bethany Vibert, PsyD, at the Child Mind Institute, 2026.
Helps parents understand why a child may be struggling socially and offer support without minimizing, interrogating, or taking over the problem.
My Child Is Bullying Others: What Should I Do?, by Brigit Katz; clinically reviewed by Jamie Howard, PhD, and Kristin Carothers, PhD, at the Child Mind Institute, 2025.
Avoids labeling children as “bullies” and instead focuses on causes, accountability, repairing harm, and learning healthier relationship skills.
Boys and the Crisis of Connection, by Jill Anderson, featuring developmental psychologist Niobe Way, at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, 2024.
Examines how cultural expectations of masculinity can discourage boys from expressing vulnerability and sustaining close friendships.
School Suspensions and Expulsions: How They Fail Kids—and Schools
American Academy of Pediatrics Council on School Health, 2024
Challenges zero-tolerance discipline and explains why exclusionary punishment can harm learning, health, belonging, and long-term outcomes.
How to Help Kids Deal With Cyberbullying
Child Mind Institute, updated 2024
Concrete guidance on documenting, blocking, reporting, supporting children emotionally, and working with schools.
Digital Life, Media, and AI
iPads in Kindergarten, YouTube Videos at Snack Time: Parents Are Pushing Back on Screens in the Early Grades
Jackie Mader, The Hechinger Report, 2026
An excellent “new thinking” article that examines screen exposure inside schools—not just children’s recreational screen use at home.
How Much Should You Monitor Your Teen’s Social Media?
Katherine Martinelli; clinical review by Dave Anderson, PhD, Child Mind Institute, 2025
Treats parental oversight as temporary scaffolding toward self-regulation rather than relying solely on surveillance or control.
Social Media and Your Child’s Mental Health: What Research Says
American Academy of Pediatrics, 2026
A more balanced alternative to articles claiming that social media is either uniformly harmful or harmless.
How to Help Kids Stay Safe With Google’s AI Search
Common Sense Media, 2026
Introduces a timely new responsibility for parents: helping children evaluate AI-generated answers, sources, confidence, and errors.
Mental Health and Emotional Well-Being
How Anxiety Affects Teenagers, by Rachel Ehmke; clinically reviewed by Jerry Bubrick, PhD, at the Child Mind Institute, 2025.
Explains how adolescent anxiety often centers on performance, appearance, social judgment, and the future—and how it can be mistaken for irritability or avoidance.
Can Teaching Self-Compassion Improve Teen Mental Health?, by Karen Bluth at Greater Good Magazine, 2026.
Presents encouraging research on self-compassion as a protective ability for adolescents, including young people experiencing serious emotional distress.
Navigating Mental Health: An Intergenerational Perspective, by the Child Mind Institute and Morgan Stanley Alliance for Children’s Mental Health, 2025.
Compares what parents and young people identify as the greatest mental-health threats, including loneliness, substance use, AI, social media, and barriers to care.
Teen Mental Health: How to Know When Your Child Needs Help, by the American Academy of Pediatrics, 2025.
Provides practical guidance for distinguishing ordinary adolescent distress from patterns that warrant professional attention.
Should Kids Take Mental Health Days?
Rae Jacobson, MS; clinical review by Jerry Bubrick, PhD, Allison Dubinski, LCSW, and Stephanie Ruggiero, PsyD, updated 2025
A nuanced treatment of when a restorative day can help and when staying home may reinforce anxiety or avoidance.
Teen Mental Health: How to Know When Your Child Needs Help
American Academy of Pediatrics, updated 2025
Helps parents distinguish ordinary adolescent variability from changes that warrant evaluation or professional support.
Navigating Mental Health: An Intergenerational Perspective
Child Mind Institute and the Morgan Stanley Alliance for Children’s Mental Health, 2025
Presents an especially interesting comparison of what parents and young people see as the greatest threats to adolescent mental health—including loneliness, substance use, social media, AI, and stigma.
Identity, Inclusion, and Life in a Diverse Society
Talking to Children About Racial Bias, by the American Academy of Pediatrics, 2024.
Explains how early children notice and internalize racial messages, why silence does not prevent bias, and how parents can model cultural understanding.
How Social-Emotional Learning Can Foster LGBTQ Inclusion at School, by Chris Tompkins at Greater Good Magazine, 2025.
Frames inclusion through empathy, self-awareness, relationships, and the ability to navigate differences compassionately.
Seven Tips for Talking With Kids About Politics, by Sahar Habib Ghazi at Greater Good Magazine, 2024.
Helps parents support children’s critical thinking, respectful dialogue, media awareness, and eventual civic participation.
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Published: July 22, 2026
Tags: back-to-school, bullying, character strengths, critical thinking, cyberbullying, discipline, education, empathy, Family-School Partnerships, gratitude, happiness, homework, internal rewards, learning, media, mentoring, moral development, neuroscience, parent engagement, parent involvement, parenting, positive values, positive youth development, praise, Sports, stress, teachers, technology
