A Koala Isn't a Bear

    Koalas remind people of teddy bears. They have thick fur and large ears. Their broad, flat nose makes them look cute, similar to teddy bears. In fact, koalas aren't cute. They have sharp teeth and very sharp claws! Koalas are marsupials. This means the mother carries her baby in a pocket while it develops, similar to a kangaroo. The baby koala lives in its mother's pocket for the first six months of its life.

    The name “koala” comes from a native Australian word that means “no drink”. The koalas get almost all their water from the eucalyptus (桉树) leaves they eat. That's where they get their food too. Koalas eat only eucalyptus leaves, and only the leaves of certain eucalyptus trees. The eucalyptus trees are where the koalas live. It's also where they sleep. Koalas sleep about nineteen hours a day!

    Why do they sleep so much? Some people think it's because they're lazy. But koalas aren't lazy. They sleep so much because there isn't much nutrition in eucalyptus leaves. Koalas store hardly any fat, so they must save their energy. One way to do this is to move slowly and sleep a lot.

    After a day of sleeping, they like to move around and eat just after sunset. They live alone most of the time. Koalas are very protective of their trees. If a koala sees another koala eating in its favorite tree, it might tell the other koala to leave by “barking” at it. Koalas do “talk” to each other. Besides barks, the males make a deep grunting sound. The mothers and babies talk in soft clicking sounds. If they get scared, they may scream like a baby.

When milk arrived on the doorstep

    When I was a boy growing up in New Jersey in the 1960s, we had a milkman delivering milk to our doorstep. His name was Mr. Basille. He wore a white cap and drove a white truck. As a 5-year-old boy, I couldn't take my eyes off the coin changer fixed to his belt. He noticed this one day during a delivery and gave me a quarter out of his coin changer.

    Of course, he delivered more than milk. There was cheese, eggs and so on. If we needed to change our order, my mother would pen a note-“Please add a bottle of buttermilk next delivery”-and place it in the box along with the empty bottles. And then, the buttermilk would magically appear.

    All of this was about more than convenience. There existed a close relationship between families and their milkmen. Mr. Basille even had a key to our house, for those times when it was so cold outside that we put the box indoors, so that the milk wouldn't freeze. And I remember Mr. Basille from time to time taking a break at our kitchen table, having a cup of tea and telling stories about his delivery.

    There is sadly no home milk delivery today. Big companies allowed the production of cheaper milk, thus making it difficult for milkmen to compete. Besides, milk is for sale everywhere, and it may just not have been practical to have a delivery service.

    Recently, an old milk box in the countryside I saw brought back my childhood memories. I took it home and planted it on the back porch （门廊）. Every so often my son's friends will ask what it is. So I start telling stories of my boyhood, and of the milkman who brought us friendship along with his milk.

    Green spaces within and around city schools improve the mental development of young children, a study has found. The findings may partly be explained by reduced exposure to traffic pollution, experts believe. Other influences could include the psychological effect of having views of fields and trees rather than roads and buildings.

    The Spanish researchers found each degree of increase in surrounding greenness led to a 5% improvement in the development of short-term, or working memory over a period of one year. It also improved the progress of "superior working memory”—the ability to update memories. with changing information—by 6%，and reduced inattentiveness. Computer analysis suggested that carbon from traffic might account for up to 65% of the trend.

    The researchers carried out mental performance tests on 2, 593 children attending 36 primary schools in Barcelona every three months for a year. Over the study period, participants' working memory increased by an average of 22.8%, and superior working memory by 15.2%, while inattentiveness decreased by 18. 9%.

    The researchers wrote, "Approximately one half of the world population lives in cities, and by 2030, three in five persons will live in urban areas worldwide, Urban areas are a network of non-natural built-up structures with increased pollutant levels and less green environments. Children's exposure to these pollutants has been associated with harmful impacts on their mental development. Our findings suggest a beneficial impact of greens paces exposure on mental development. "

    British experts said the study was interesting, but pointed out some limitations. Professor Andy Jones, from Norwich medical school, said, “The measure of green space used was the number of plants in the neighborhoods of the children and their schools. It was not a direct measure of usable green spaces, like public parks, although they will be included. " Dr Ross Cameron, at the University of Sheffield, said, “The authors suggest a causal link between air quality and green space. They admit, however, that this factor only seems to explain part of their correlations(相互关系), ”

    Mid-afternoon on a particularly busy Tuesday, I took leave of my desk at work and walked into a local Starbucks only to find a space where neither my clients nor my children would ask me to do something.

    Inside, I ran into Kate, a co-worker of mine. The topic of parenthood came up. I complained about how packed my schedule was. From the minute I woke up to the minute I fell asleep, I was constantly in demand and always had someone knocking at the door. But a bit of sadness seemed to come over Kate's face.

    "Well, my daughter's in San Francisco and she doesn't seem to need me at all these days," Kate said. It was in that moment that I realized although I might often feel in high demand, there will come a day when I will actually miss that same stress I then complained about.

    And as our conversation continued, it turned to our children's younger years, with Kate smiling proudly, thinking of the little boy and girl she raised who are now a man and a woman. But I noticed her smile was marked with regret. She explained that she often wondered about what she could have done differently when her children were in their earlier years.

    This got me thinking. Is regret an unfortunate footnote (注脚) to parenthood? With that in mind, I asked six older parents one question: What is your biggest regret from your early days as a parent?

    It turned out that all of them thought they could have done it better. But, each of them also has a strong, healthy relationship with their kids. Whatever regrets their parents might have had about their upbringing, one thing is clear —— it didn't affect them in a meaningful way.

    The bottom line is, we all feel like we could be doing this parenting thing better. And quite clearly, years later, we're still going to look back and wish we tried things differently. But the past can't be changed, and neither should it.

    People often say that there is nothing in the world that can be as great as a mother's love. Some mother expressions mean just that. The phrase "mother lode" comes from mining. It means the place where the largest amount of gold can be found. But now, the term "mother lode" means a rich supply of anything. For example, you might say, "She just graduated from college and struck the mother lode with her new job!"

    When we call something "the mother of all", this means it is the biggest or best of something. Here is an example: "We are going to throw the mother of all parties this weekend. So you have to come!"

    Naturally, the word "mother" can be used to mean to give birth, even to something you cannot touch, such as an idea or wisdom. The saying "necessity is the mother of invention" means that when people really need to do something, they will find a way to do it. And "experience is the mother of wisdom" means that people learn from what happens to them.

    You might think all expressions about mothers are sweet and loving. Not so. A boy who is "tied to his mother's apron strings(围裙带)" is controlled by his mother. We can also call him a "mama's boy". Both of these terms are even more insulting(侮辱人的) if you are talking about a man, not a young boy. It can be a huge mistake for a woman to marry a "mama's boy" who is still "tied to his mother's apron strings".

    A show about mothers would not be complete without talking about the very popular but mysterious "Mother Goose". The short poems and songs that "Mother Goose" wrote are a part of growing up in the United States. Real or not, you could say "Mother Goose" is the mother of all nursery rhyme(童谣) writers.

    Should Parents Teach Children How to Tweet?

    Social media is a seemingly endless source of concern for parents, with worries that it weakens their children's confidence and attention spans. But others counter that it could also be broadening their horizons.

    The latest round of worry was sparked by a study of the impact of social media use on 8-12- year-olds published by Anne Longfield, Children's Commissioner for England. The report focused on 32 children, who said they used social media to stay connected with friends and family and to have fun, by watching videos for example. But they also described pressures from constant contact, online comments that weaken their self-esteem, and the need to shape offline activities to make them shareable. "You see your friends going ice skating, partying or talking about how much revision they have done, and it can make you feel inadequate," says Bea, a junior school student from Bristol, UK. "It's just so hard to get away from."

    Children have to take risks on their journeys to adulthood, and desires to fit in and be popular existed before Mark Zuckerberg came along with Facebook. However, in previous generations these pressures came largely from people they knew, and they mostly stayed outside the home. Now the pressures could come from any one of the nearly 3 billion people online, and follow them from school to home, and can even continue through the night.

    The pressures do get on parents' nerves, among which the utmost concern is how their children can be protected from harms, given that social media is now integral to the way many young people interact. A good starting point is a basic understanding of childhood development milestones.

    Broadly, children have a high dependency on carers for security and guidance up to the age of 5, increasing independence and self-care from 6 to 11, and increasing autonomy and growing reliance on peers from 12-18 years old. Against this background, the suitability of social media for children of different ages should be considered respectively.

    According to Longfield's study, children should be taught about online safety from an early age, better before secondary school. There is growing evidence that efforts need to be extended to provide earlier guidance on less extreme but more common risks, including oversharing, low selfesteem, addiction and insomnia. The evidence suggests she is right. However, approaches that focus merely on the potential negatives are unlikely to work.

    "My school has tried to do a lot, but it often involves trying to drill into us how bad social media can be," says Bea. "People of my age really like social media, so I think a better approach would be if they said ‘Although it is good, here are some negatives'."