A 9-year-old student took a school board to task over its apparent 180 on a policy barring teachers from displaying Black Lives Matter posters.

The student, who only identified herself as "Novalee," said she saw posters of Black Lives Matter and Amanda Gorman on her teacher’s wall at Lakeville Elementary School. The presence of these posters, she said, contradicted what the school board said at a prior meeting: "no politics in school."

When she cited a school board policy prohibiting Black Lives Matter posters in the district’s schools, the principal allegedly told her that the school board members were the ones who made the posters.

"I am nine years old and I know that," she said. "You expect to believe that you did not know what you were doing when you were making these posters? C’mon people!"

Author and sociologist Kyl Myers — who made headlines over the last few years for announcing the birth of her gender-neutral "theyby" — has announced that her child, Zoomer, is a boy.

Myers and her husband Brent Courtney did not announce the child's gender when it was born, stating in 2018, "We don't disclose Zoomer's genitals to people who don't need to know."

Specifically, it found that 37% of all students are learning below their grade level, in both English and math classes. In english language classes, a breakdown of the information for kindergarten through 10th grade shows that students for whom English is not their first language, 65% are below grade level. For economically disadvantaged students, the number is 54% below grade level. It’s 52% for Hispanics, and 51% for African Americans.

Critical Race Theory supports the belief that racism is infused in American society, as well as in its institutions and legal systems.

In an 8-0 vote, the Florida Board of Education approved a rule change which says "instruction on the required topics must be factual and objective, and may not suppress or distort significant historical events."

Beech-Nut Nutrition, a popular brand of baby food, is voluntarily recalling a lot of its rice cereal because it contained levels of arsenic above federal guidelines.

In the recall notice posted on the Food & Drug Administration website this week, Beech-Nut also has announced it will no longer sell the rice cereal and says it has "decided to exit the market for Beech-Nut branded Single Grain Rice Cereal."

I know this is going to sound like a nonproblem at first, but there is a deeper issue that troubles me. Our 16-year-old son is an amazing kid: intelligent, hardworking, and athletic. He is a straight-A student who juggles multiple AP classes with a demanding sports schedule. He is one of the top three students in his class and is also being recruited by college coaches for his sport. But ever since he was in elementary school, we’ve had the same experience at the end-of-year awards ceremonies: He’ll occasionally get recognized for the “objective” awards, like honor roll or scoring the highest on foreign-language tests, but he has never won a single “subjective” award, the ones selected by teachers/coaches or voted on by his peers. When he was little, we would console him by saying “Don’t worry, just keep working hard and maybe you’ll get one next year!”

But after several years of that, we changed our message, instead emphasizing that hard work is its own reward, and that we are proud of him for his diligence and work ethic. I suspect one of the reasons he gets so little recognition is his personality: He is extremely quiet, introverted, and serious. He has a handful of close friends but gets along with everybody; his school tends to be a bit “clique-ish,” but he is one of the few students who has good friends among both the “smart kids” and the athletes.

I’m not concerned about the awards themselves or about him impressing anyone else. Now that he’s older, he tends to brush it off as no big deal. But I just watched him sit through yet another awards ceremony with a forced smile on his face and tears in his eyes as every one of his friends at the table got a special award from one of the teachers or coaches. He sometimes comments about feeling “invisible” because he doesn’t have the charm and charisma of some of his peers. We’ve tried telling him that sometimes teachers like to reward students for their effort since the students who excel in class already get the reward of good grades. But this doesn’t feel right either, especially after seeing him come home exhausted from a three-hour sports practice and then stay up till 1 a.m. studying.

After 10-plus years of this, I can’t help worrying that maybe we should be giving him different advice—instead of preaching self-acceptance, perhaps we should be telling him to adjust his personality, so he is a bit more likable? He is headed to college soon, so maybe I should do nothing and let him figure it out himself?

—Mom of the Invisible Man

After peaking in January and then steadily declining in the following months, COVID-19 hospitalization rates among teens nearly doubled from March to April, according to a new report.

Among 205 adolescents hospitalized for COVID-19 between January and March, about 31% were admitted to an intensive care unit and 5% required invasive mechanical ventilation, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found. Still, none of the teens died from the disease in that time.

The hospitalization trend directly contrasts with that of adults aged 65 and older, which has stabilized during the same period largely because of high vaccination rates among older populations.

A family in Spokane, Washington, is demanding that a school administrator be removed after he suggested he could segregate two Black middle school students who were directed to clean freshly picked cotton as part of a classroom assignment, according to lawyers for the family.

As if coping with midnight feeds and 3am nappy changes wasn’t hard enough, scientists now say that sleepless nights can age new mothers by up to seven years.

Research suggests that lack of sleep in the first six months after a baby is born speeds up ageing.

Regularly getting less than seven hours of sleep a night can leave a woman’s body between three and seven years older, the study found.

Last fall, parents at the posh $55,000-per-year Dalton School got wind of their first-graders being taught sex-education lessons that included masturbation.

The Post viewed video of a cartoon Fonte used in one of her sex-ed classes for 6-year-olds showing little kids talking about “touching themselves” for pleasure.

“Hey, how come sometimes my penis gets big sometimes and points in the air?” asks the little boy in the cartoon, leading to an explanation of what an “erection” is.

The boy nods and says, “Sometimes I touch my penis because it feels good.”

My siblings—one sister and two brothers, with nine kids between us—and I have a problem. Our mom, who is in her early 60s, has recently become a crazed conspiracy theorist, spouting the whole QAnon/Trump/Bill Gates BS that’s been going around (with even weirder stuff that I’m pretty sure she makes up). She’s seen a doctor who said she isn’t insane and doesn’t have dementia, so there’s nothing we can do except try to ignore it. But here’s the thing: despite my siblings and me having a wide range of political views, none of us wants our kids hearing this stuff. We love our mom and she’s a wonderful grandma, but this has gotten out of control. She won’t stop talking about it. It’s impossible to change the subject, and somehow she finds ways to bring it up during every conversation. If someone’s talking about getting a new computer, she responds, “Oh, well, I hope it wasn’t a MICROSOFT because lizard people and mole children and blah, blah.”

Our kids range in age from 2 to 25. She doesn’t say anything in front of the kids when we’re present, but my older nieces have mentioned that she rants to them anytime they’re alone together (which has seriously damaged their relationship with her), so I’m sure it’s only a matter of time before she pulls this with the younger kids, too. What do we do? Cut her off completely? Only allow supervised visits and no sleepovers? We all live within 15 minutes of each other and see each other frequently. She also babysits a lot. Do we explain that Grandma is insane but we still love her? I hate that she has been sucked into this.

—At A Loss

I have been with the same guy for six years, married for one. He has two sons from a previous marriage, and she is not in the picture. If it is relevant I’m a male too. My husband has asked me if I could accept his moving into his own apartment for a year because he has never been on his own. He says he doesn’t want us to break up, just live apart for a while. The boys would stay with me in our home, and he would take them to spend the night every so often. We would also have a weekly date night just to keep our relationship “on track.” He married his ex right out of high school, and they had children right away, so he really hasn’t ever been on his own. I have not given a response other than asking a few questions. Truthfully the idea makes me mad as hell and I just want to tell him to leave if you want and take your damn brats with you! Then I calm down and realize I can’t live without him and the boys. Or maybe I can. I feel this is unbelievably selfish of him, but I kind of understand. But the boys have already been abandoned by their mother, how would this plan affect them? I am so confused, and hurt. Help!

“If your brain isn’t cognitively ready to imagine someone else’s experience, it’s harder to have empathy,” said Pressman.

Yet it is important that as kids move from toddler-dom into the school-age years, parents actively teach them that they will not always get their way. Parents also should explain to children that not getting their way may feel bad, which is expected.

For example, when your child is shopping for a friend’s birthday present and they ask for a toy of their own, don’t give in, Pressman urged. Instead, maybe say something like: “We’re going into the store to buy a present for Billy. I know sometimes that can feel hard, and it’s hard to focus,” Pressman said. That’s it.

You’re giving them space to grapple with what it feels like to not get their way, and you’re showing them that you expect them to get through it. It can be a pretty powerful lesson, particularly when it’s repeated often as a natural part of growing up.

Young men and boys are being radicalised into hating women, the British author behind the Everyday Sexism Project has warned, saying online groups are targeting boys as young as 11.

Over the last couple of years, she said, she noticed a major increase in school-age British boys expressing ideas and using language she had seen on radical online hate groups.

“They were parroting verbatim the same myths and misconceptions in schools across the country,” Bates, whose new book, “Men who Hate Women”, was published on Thursday, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation in an interview.

Some mass killings by young men in recent years have been linked to anger against women, something some analysts say is being fuelled by social media.

Parents often refer to their children as their “pride and joy.” But research tells a different story: Having kids doesn’t necessarily make people happier.

Most parents feel that their children are incredibly important sources of life satisfaction, says Jennifer Glass, professor of sociology at the University of Texas at Austin and a demographer who studies the relationship between parenthood and well-being.

“But that’s not the same thing as happiness, and it’s not the same thing as financial well-being, good physical health or good emotional health,” Glass tells CNBC Make It.

So, why does having kids not provide the happiness that we think it will?