Links of the day

A couple of links of interest today:

• Children and texting: this NYT article looked devices that got kids into texting. This provoked the inevitable discussion of when is young, too young? Here is my 2 cents: texting is a form of communication. We teach children to speak and write, what's wrong with getting them to write short messages at an early age? My kids get to text with abandon. The other day I saw my 5 year old doing something with a device. "I'm messaging." "Who?" "Mummy." Turns out that she was playing with a calculator but the experience of communication was invaluable. When she is a teenager we will long for the days she was willing to communicate by calculator.
• Evidence-based guilt: Andrew Leigh points to two research papers in economics that indicate that the competitive college admissions environment is driving parents to spend more time with the kids in the hope of giving them an advantage. The flip-side implication is that if you aren't doing that you are sabotaging your kid's future. Usual caveats about correlation and causation apply.