"There is a belief that young kids can self-regulate their food intake," says Barbara Rolls. "This study shows those signals are really easy to override."

Parents are often guilty of helping their child a bit too much with their homework. Sometimes the homework battle can be made that little bit easier if you just tell your child what to do, or simply do it for them. At least it’s been done, you think.

Vast amounts of personal, behavioural and academic data about children are being collected, processed and used by schools, local authorities, and the government every year.

If you want your toddler to be a healthy weight you might control portion sizes or the frequency of their meals and snacks. Of course, you could use both of these strategies, but a study we recently published found that one strategy is likely to be much more effective than the other depending on the traits in appetites of individual children.

Children come in all shapes and sizes, but not with a manual. Childhood achievements such as walking and talking are often celebrated signs that things are going well in a child’s life. However, once these achievements start being compared between children (at the park, on Facebook) they can become the cause of anxiety.

While most people agree that it is bad practice to lie to children, most parents will make an exception when it comes to Santa Claus, the roly-poly, white-bearded philanthropist who visits at this time of year with a sleighload of gifts.

Until the last decade, many young people with a life-limiting or life-threatening condition were not expected to live into adulthood. Now improvements in medicine and technology have changed all that for children with conditions such as duchenne muscular or spinal muscular atrophy which cause serious degeneration of muscles and nerves, or genetic disorders, such as cystic fibrosis.

The Collins English Dictionary unveiled a thoroughly modern concept as its word of the year for 2015: binge watching. It usually refers to consuming endless hours of movies or series on Netflix, one after the other. But binge watching is about the more fundamental issue of the world’s obsession with content consumption.

The influence of student poverty on student learning is indisputable. International studies demonstrate that in every country, children from disadvantaged backgrounds are much less likely to excel in school than their more fortunate peers.

Sixteen years after they published their formal recommendations discouraging any form of screen time before age two – and 14 years after making recommendations to limit screen time for older children to no more than two hours per day – they are now recanting those recommendations, calling them “outdated.”

Disciplining works if it is not over the top and children understand the point of it. Highlights magazine’s annual State of Kids survey found that a majority of children appreciated being disciplined and believed that it helped them behave better.