On Tuesday, doctors, nurses and health workers across the United States began to give Covid-19 vaccinations to children 6 months to 5 years old, the final group of Americans to gain access to the shots. It was a milestone in the coronavirus pandemic, 18 long months after adults first beganContinue Reading
While the spread of new coronavirus cases is steady or slowing in many parts of the world, it is accelerating in the Western Hemisphere, where new case reports rose by 20 percent in the past week, the World Health Organization warned on Wednesday. North America, where new case reports areContinue Reading
Federal health officials are poised to take the final steps on Saturday to clear the Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech coronavirus vaccines for very young children — the only age group in the United States that does not yet have a vaccine option available. If the two vaccines are cleared, as expected,Continue Reading
If a newborn child grows up hearing people speaking in many different languages, will it later be able to speak all those languages? — Puneesh T., India Children learn languages from the people around them. If they are exposed to multiple languages, they may grow up bilingual or multilingual. TheseContinue Reading
The White House has outlined the early stages of its plan for making coronavirus vaccines available this month to roughly 18 million children younger than 5, the last group of Americans yet to be eligible for the shots. The Biden administration has made 10 million doses available to states andContinue Reading
It was three days before Christmas, and Elizabeth Widders was perched in her upstairs bathroom, fastening red and green bows in the hair of her 4-year-old daughter, Liviah. But as Liviah stood in the morning light, her mother noticed that the whites of her eyes had turned yellow. She hustledContinue Reading
The final day of classes in Ukraine is normally a festive occasion when gleeful students get dressed up and jump into fountains — and as tradition dictates, the smallest student climbs onto the shoulders of the tallest to ring a bell marking the school year’s end. This year, in theContinue Reading
Maite Rodriguez, her mother’s only daughter, dreamed of becoming a marine biologist. Tess Marie Mata played the same position on her softball team — second base — as her favorite Houston Astros player. Layla Salazar sang “Sweet Child O’ Mine,” by Guns N’ Roses, with her father on their morningContinue Reading
I didn’t understand then how much would change, or how quickly. Soon after, the park road was closed because of melting permafrost and landslides, locking a bike trip to Polychrome Pass into the archives of the past. I couldn’t see past the present chaos of family life, each hour messyContinue Reading
Many measures of adolescent mental health began to deteriorate sometime around 2009. It is true of the number of U.S. high-school students who say they feel persistently sad or hopeless. It’s also true of reported loneliness. And it is true of emergency room visits for self-harm among Americans ages 10Continue Reading