Prioritizing play offers a variety of benefits for children, from helping them grow their vocabulary to managing their big feelings with fewer behavioral problems. Play also benefits children’s cognitive and social and emotional development.

All children are born ready to learn, but for 15 million children living in poverty in America, they enter school unready to succeed. Before even walking through the classroom door, American children living in poverty have already fallen behind in school.

Can we teach children to be kinder? A recent study suggests the answer is yes—and that the effects reach beyond kindness itself.

School is out, the mercury is climbing at a record pace, and young people across America are at risk of losing the reading and math skills they learned during the academic year. In an average year, kids lose about 20% of their progress in reading and 27% ...