“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 a …

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 …

Mayor Thomas Menino’s declaration of a public health emergency this week reminded me of the last time we took the flu so seriously, during the 2009 pandemic. On an October Saturday that year, my family stood in line for 2 1/2 hours with one Red Sox player, his wife and kids, and dozens of others at our pediatric practice to receive the H1N1 vaccine. At the end of that line lay nasal mist, thankfully, no injections. Because a month before, our children had already received the seasonal vaccine. And they needed another dose of H1N1 spray one month after the first to provide protection. We made …

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 …

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 …

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 in Florida who was fatally shot by a man on a neighborhood watch five weeks ago. But fear of harm done to …

“Mommy, I’m fat,” says my daughter, all 40-something lbs. and 40-something inches of her.  I see a perfectly smooth belly, and a body that is all little-kid taut. She looks in the mirror and manages to stick out her tummy a bit farther by arching her back. “You’re not fat,” comes my truthful response. It's a conversation that goes on.  As much as kids are their parents’ parrots, I hope my child is not copying my own body concerns – since I have my metabolism and city walking to thank and I’m not overweight. But to blame her behavior on any media is all too easy. Yet talk about fat we will – …

There’s little magic to being “in the zone” when it comes to school assignments in Boston. After Patch.com columnists Jack Kelly and John Keith both wrote about the promise of neighborhood schools last week, I thought about our limited access to public schools in the downtown neighborhoods. According to Boston Public Schools (BPS), every address in the city has a “walk zone” elementary school, which is one mile or less away.  The walk zone is the main factor by which school assignments are made in our city. Yet since Beacon Hill lost its elementary school in 1975, the neighborhood, as well as…

In my favorite children's books, the writer and illustrator are one; two talents residing in a single gifted artist who can create beauty in both words and pictures.Grace Lin is one of those artists. This week, for Lunar New Year, she is everywhere in our house. Not only have we been reading her picture book about the holiday, but on Jan. 21 she held a book launch for her newest novel, "Dumpling Days." When you attend a Grace Lin book launch – patronizing an independent bookstore, standing in line – you leave with not just an autographed book, but with what kids have come to expect from any …

If you ask a child, "who was Martin Luther King, Jr.?" and the answer is, "he freed the slaves" – here's a chance to teach more about one of Boston's most important alumni.  Ryan Hendrickson remembers hearing that response once, from a very young student on a tour of the library at Boston University. As the assistant director for manuscripts at BU's archival research center, Mr. Hendrickson and his coworkers are the keepers of the collected papers that Reverend King donated to BU in 1964. For the holiday in King's honor Jan. 16, special events around the city reflect the civil rights leader's…

What is the one holiday tradition you can't live without? Let's take family and friends' presence as a given; you get them for free on this quiz. Is it the roast beast on the dinner table? Church at midnight? Cruising the town to find the best-dressed, most brightly-lit house, threatening to blow the whole neighborhood's electrical transformer?  These traditions are evergreen, all. But my choice is the endangered species of customs – Christmas cards.This week, while most people are probably not missing the ample displays (gone) of boxed cards at their local card shop (gone), I'm waiting for …

Among the many places a four-year-old does not belong, a 40,000 sq. ft. bakery is probably one of them.Yet there we were: one preschooler, her two sisters, and their parents – roaming the cavernous, cinnamon-spiced spaces of Leo's Bakery in South Boston, on the weekend before Thanksgiving. To kick off our holidays, my husband wanted our family to do something purposeful together. With visions of helpfulness dancing in his head, he web-searched his way to "Pie in the Sky," the annual event that marries the generosity of bakeries and restaurants with pie buyers. The $25 pie purchases go to …

Jane's husband is home. No more helicopters whirring in the background of every tenuous satellite phone call, no more talking in code. No more worrying about certain Marines in Afghanistan, no more kids sharing the life-size, cardboard-cutout photo of Dad. This Thanksgiving, Jane's husband is a veteran of the war, and he's back. He's back on the streets of Boston, as a police officer for the city. That's no picnic itself, but it's not Helmand province, Afghanistan, either (to protect the family's privacy, we're not using their real names).Deployed in March 2010, Tom went to the U.S. Marines' …

If there's any group in America that gets as much done for families and kids in their community as this group of Boston moms, I'd like to know. It sounds like an exaggeration. But from its welcome baskets for new moms to the dozens of events it hosts each year, the Charlestown Mothers Association (CMA) runs on the power of sheer, optimistic volunteerism – and no money of its own. And as it turns out, it's very difficult to find another group anywhere who has the audacity to welcome its members for free, yet offer so much programming. Since 1997, the CMA has grown from a handful of moms to 1,…

From the third floor of the nearly empty house, I watched the maple's whirlybirds softly helicopter their way down to the ground, onto a thin carpet of dry, autumn leaves. Windless and overcast, the day held few promises, and the green seeds didn't fall far. Downstairs, a dozen people were engaged in animated conversations. Voices echoed off the emptiness. With a box here, a rug there, markers and crayons scattered between, the party's smaller guests ran up and down flights and played games. We were at a farewell for friends who were moving 7,000 miles away, to India, the very next day. Mom …

As my mother was getting her weekend grandchild fix over the phone last Sunday, I knew she'd be asking about the new school year and how each girl was getting along. The phone was passed from one person to the next. And then, in answer to some question my mom had asked, I overheard my daughter say quietly, evenly: "I don't have a friend yet." My ears pricked up, but mere murmuring followed. We were two weeks into a new school experience for this child and her older sister; I'd been trying to play it cool and not ask too many questions about how they were feeling, despite my desire for …

Just before we admit that, by any definition of calendar or weather, summer is over, there's a family game we haul out of storage for a few days at this time of year. Seek out a place with a lot of foot traffic, and prepare to people watch. For the players, driving is better than walking, because in the privacy of your car you can shout it out: It's called Freshmen Spotting. You already know the rules: First, look for a cluster of young adults. Intent on their conversations, they're walking somewhat closely together, the better not to lose one's way in strange territory. They clutch not …

For our family, the one-man terror attack in Norway last month hit close to home in only the most self-interested sense: We were due to visit Oslo in a few short weeks, and in the midst of planning the trip, we wondered, would it be safe to take the children?  Whenever we travel, my own mother's chief worry is that I will lose one of her grandkids in a completely unfamiliar place. So taking them to the heart of the world's newest target of extremism was a fresh concern altogether.   Part of the purpose of leaving home is to try to see the world from a different perspective: How would we …

Ten days and counting: That's all the time you have left to catch the Museum of Fine Arts' Chihuly exhibit, your best chance of getting kids and art together this summer. Yes, you still can't touch, and virtually everything in this celebration of glass is breakable. (Don't even bother with the nightmare of trying to figure out how you'd pay for that mishap.) But for sheer, entertaining dazzle, this colorful, 3-D experience is the most kid-friendly opportunity in town to inspire some creativity and learn about an accomplished living artist – and there is nothing like it on the museum horizon…