(Feature Impact) From beach escapes to international adventures, travel is still a top priority for millions of Americans, particularly during the warm-weather seasons. However, in light of evolving global events – and the changing travel advisories that often accompany them – preparation and awareness are key.

Travel planning should be exciting, and being a prepared traveler ensures you can focus on making memories rather than managing surprises. That means doing your homework before you go, remaining cautious and aware while you’re there and being ready to respond should the unexpected happen.

As you pack your bags, the experts at ALG Vacations recommend taking proactive steps like these to stay informed, protected and confident no matter where your adventures take you.

Research Your Destination

Familiarize yourself with local customs, transportation options and any travel advisories tied to your destination, which often vary by region, not country. If you’re heading abroad, consider enrolling in the Smart Traveler Enrollment Program (STEP) offered by the U.S. State Department. The free service provides real-time, destination-specific updates about health, weather, safety and security, and makes it easier to contact you in case of an emergency.

Consult with a Travel Advisor

One of the most effective safety measures is working with a professional travel advisor. Advisors monitor travel advisories in real time, understand geographic nuances and regional differences within destinations and can provide verified information directly from destination partners. If plans need to change, your advisor can recommend alternatives and help manage rebooking options.

Consider Travel Insurance

Preparation also means protecting your investment. Unexpected events – from flight cancellations and changes in advisory level to medical emergencies and weather delays – can happen at any time. Travel insurance adds an extra layer of protection, helping cover eligible expenses and providing peace of mind. If you elect coverage, review policy options carefully to understand what is and isn’t covered by your plan.

Share Your Plans with Someone at Home

Before departing, provide a trusted friend or family member with copies of your itinerary, lodging information and contact details. This ensures someone knows where you are and how to reach you in case of an emergency, flight disruption or unexpected change in plans.

To find more tips, or to connect with a travel advisor and benefit from personalized expert guidance on your spring excursion, visit TravelAdvisorsGetYouThere.com.

Frequently Asked Questions About Safe Travel to Mexico

Many of Mexico’s popular beach destinations – including Cancun, Riviera Maya, Costa Mujeres and Tulum – are operating as normal and welcoming visitors under a Level 2: Exercise Increased Caution advisory, which encourages travelers to remain aware of their surroundings and follow standard safety precautions, but does not discourage travel.

Stay informed of changes to advisory levels through official updates from the U.S. Embassy and the STEP program and consider these questions frequently asked to ALG Vacations travel advisors when planning your trip.

• Is it safe to travel to Mexico right now?
  Travelers should follow the U.S. State Department’s official guidance. If visiting a destination in Mexico under the Level 2 advisory, which is a common advisory level globally that also applies to destinations such as France and Italy, exercise standard travel precautions.
• Has the Puerto Vallarta shelter-in-place order been lifted?
  Yes, the shelter-in-place guidance affecting Puerto Vallarta has been lifted. However, travelers
  should regularly monitor official sources for updates or changes.
• Are Cancun, Riviera Maya, Costa Mujeres or Tulum experiencing disruptions?
  Airports in Cancun, Cozumel and Tulum are operating normally. Hotels, cruise ports and tourism services are also fully operational.
• Are Los Cabos operations impacted?
  Los Cabos tourism operations remain fully operational, including airport activity, ground transportation and hotel and resort operations.
• What are some alternative destinations?
  For those who may be exploring alternative plans, consider these popular spring destinations both domestically and abroad:

• Caribbean destinations including Jamaica and the Dominican Republic
• U.S. warm-weather destinations like Hawaii and Florida
• European island destinations such as Mallorca, Spain or Corfu, Greece

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock

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Our Lifestyle section on STM Daily News is a hub of inspiration and practical information, offering a range of articles that touch on various aspects of daily life. From tips on family finances to guides for maintaining health and wellness, we strive to empower our readers with knowledge and resources to enhance their lifestyles. Whether you’re seeking outdoor activity ideas, fashion trends, or travel recommendations, our lifestyle section has got you covered. Visit us today at https://stmdailynews.com/category/lifestyle/ and embark on a journey of discovery and self-improvement.

Last Updated on March 16, 2026 by Daily News Staff

Celeste Kidd, University of California, Berkeley

I’m in a coffee shop when a young child dumps out his mother’s bag in search of fruit snacks. The contents spill onto the table, bench and floor. It’s a chaotic – but functional – solution to the problem.

Children have a penchant for unconventional thinking that, at first glance, can look disordered. This kind of apparently chaotic behavior served as the inspiration for developmental psychologist Jean Piaget’s best-known theory: that children construct their knowledge through experience and must pass through four sequential stages, the first two of which lack the ability to use structured logic.

Piaget remains the GOAT of developmental psychology. He fundamentally and forever changed the world’s view of children by showing that kids do not enter the world with the same conceptual building blocks as adults, but must construct them through experience. No one before or since has amassed such a catalog of quirky child behaviors that researchers even today can replicate within individual children.

While Piaget was certainly correct in observing that children engage in a host of unusual behaviors, my lab recently uncovered evidence that upends some long-standing assumptions about the limits of children’s logical capabilities that originated with his work. Our new paper in the journal Nature Human Behaviour describes how young children are capable of finding systematic solutions to complex problems without any instruction. https://www.youtube.com/embed/Qb4TPj1pxzQ?wmode=transparent&start=0 Jean Piaget describes how children of different ages tackle a sorting task, with varying success.

Putting things in order

Throughout the 1960s, Piaget observed that young children rely on clunky trial-and-error methods rather than systematic strategies when attempting to order objects according to some continuous quantitative dimension, like length. For instance, a 4-year-old child asked to organize sticks from shortest to longest will move them around randomly and usually not achieve the desired final order.

Psychologists have interpreted young children’s inefficient behavior in this kind of ordering task – what we call a seriation task – as an indicator that kids can’t use systematic strategies in problem-solving until at least age 7.

Somewhat counterintuitively, my colleagues and I found that increasing the difficulty and cognitive demands of the seriation task actually prompted young children to discover and use algorithmic solutions to solve it.

Piaget’s classic study asked children to put some visible items like wooden sticks in order by height. Huiwen Alex Yang, a psychology Ph.D. candidate who works on computational models of learning in my lab, cranked up the difficulty for our version of the task. With advice from our collaborator Bill Thompson, Yang designed a computer game that required children to use feedback clues to infer the height order of items hidden behind a wall, .

The game asked children to order bunnylike creatures from shortest to tallest by clicking on their sneakers to swap their places. The creatures only changed places if they were in the wrong order; otherwise they stayed put. Because they could only see the bunnies’ shoes and not their heights, children had to rely on logical inference rather than direct observation to solve the task. Yang tested 123 children between the ages of 4 and 10. https://www.youtube.com/embed/GlsbcE6nOxk?wmode=transparent&start=0 Researcher Huiwen Alex Yang tests 8-year-old Miro on the bunny sorting task. The bunnies are hidden behind a wall with only their sneakers visible. Miro’s selections exemplify use of selection sort, a classic efficient sorting algorithm from computer science. Kidd Lab at UC Berkeley.

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Figuring out a strategy

We found that children independently discovered and applied at least two well-known sorting algorithms. These strategies – called selection sort and shaker sort – are typically studied in computer science.

More than half the children we tested demonstrated evidence of structured algorithmic thinking, and at ages as young as 4 years old. While older kids were more likely to use algorithmic strategies, our finding contrasts with Piaget’s belief that children were incapable of this kind of systematic strategizing before 7 years of age. He thought kids needed to reach what he called the concrete operational stage of development first.

Our results suggest that children are actually capable of spontaneous logical strategy discovery much earlier when circumstances require it. In our task, a trial-and-error strategy could not work because the objects to be ordered were not directly observable; children could not rely on perceptual feedback.

Explaining our results requires a more nuanced interpretation of Piaget’s original data. While children may still favor apparently less logical solutions to problems during the first two Piagetian stages, it’s not because they are incapable of doing otherwise if the situation requires it.

A systematic approach to life

Algorithmic thinking is crucial not only in high-level math classes, but also in everyday life. Imagine that you need to bake two dozen cookies, but your go-to recipe yields only one. You could go through all the steps of making the recipe twice, washing the bowl in between, but you’d never do that because you know that would be inefficient. Instead, you’d double the ingredients and perform each step only once. Algorithmic thinking allows you to identify a systematic way of approaching the need for twice as many cookies that improves the efficiency of your baking.

Algorithmic thinking is an important capacity that’s useful to children as they learn to move and operate in the world – and we now know they have access to these abilities far earlier than psychologists had believed.

That children can engage with algorithmic thinking before formal instruction has important implications for STEM – science, technology, engineering and math –education. Caregivers and educators now need to reconsider when and how they give children the opportunity to tackle more abstract problems and concepts. Knowing that children’s minds are ready for structured problems as early as preschool means we can nurture these abilities earlier in support of stronger math and computational skills.

And have some patience next time you encounter children interacting with the world in ways that are perhaps not super convenient. As you pick up your belongings from a café floor, remember that it’s all part of how children construct their knowledge. Those seemingly chaotic kids are on their way to more obviously logical behavior soon.

Celeste Kidd, Professor of Psychology, University of California, Berkeley

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Last Updated on March 14, 2026 by Daily News Staff

Smart Gaming: How Parents Can Keep Kids Safe Online

(Family Features) Playing video games can be a fun, social experience. However, online gaming also poses real risks, especially for kids. As a parent, you don’t necessarily need to be a gamer yourself to help keep your children safe when the controller is in their hands.

Consider taking proactive steps like these to create a healthy online gaming environment for kids of all ages.

Check System Privacy Settings
As a first line of defense – before your child even starts gaming – spend some time in the device or console privacy settings. Here you can turn off sharing, disable location tracking, limit microphone and camera access and restrict how other users can interact with your child’s profile. Similarly, many games and platforms include built-in privacy settings that can be tailored to your child’s age and online experience. These settings may allow you to limit who can view your child’s profile or send a friend request, message or voice chat.

Research Games
Because not all games are created equal, look up game ratings through a service such as ESRB before buying or downloading to understand the maturity level of the game and determine if it’s appropriate for your child. To take it a step further, read reviews from other parents or watch gameplay videos to see if you deem not only the content but also the social interaction acceptable.

Use Facial Age Estimation
Online platforms are increasingly looking for ways to keep users safe, and that includes added levels of verification. As part of a multilayered approach to safety, Roblox is the first online gaming platform to require age checks for users of all ages to access chat features, enabling age-appropriate communication and limiting conversations between adults and minors. These secure age checks are designed to be fast, easy and secure using Facial Age Estimation technology directly within the app.

“Our commitment to safety is rooted in delivering the highest level of protection for our users,” said Matt Kaufman, chief safety officer at Roblox. “By building proactive, age-based barriers, we can empower users to create and connect in ways that are both safe and appropriate.”

Once age-checked, users are assigned to one of six age groups: under 9, 9-12, 13-15, 16-17, 18-20 or 21 and older, ensuring conversations are safe and age appropriate. Age checks are optional; however, features like chat will not be accessible unless an age check is completed. Chat is also turned off by default for children under age 9, unless a parent provides consent after an age check.

Keep Personal Information Private
It’s seldom a bad idea to be extra cautious when interacting with strangers online, even if they seem friendly enough while playing the game. Teach children what information not to share, including their full name, address, birthday, school name, phone number, email address, passwords or any photos that may contain any personal information (like a house number or school logo) in the background. Also encourage a screen name and generic avatar for added privacy.

Turn on Parental Controls
Designed to allow parents a supervisory role in their child’s online gaming experience, parental controls on many platforms include the ability to set schedules and limit playtime, restrict access to certain content or social features, require a password for purchases or set a spending limit.

Avoid Clicking Unfamiliar Links
Player profiles and in-game chats may include links to external sites, including those promising rewards or cheat codes. Because they can be used to gain access to personal information, remind your children to ask an adult before clicking any unfamiliar links while gaming so they can be verified as trustworthy.

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Employ Privacy and Security Tools
While system or console-specific settings allow parents to set content restrictions, approve downloads, manage friends lists and more, additional layers of security are sometimes necessary. Extra safeguards such as antivirus and internet security software, DNS (domain name system) filtering and two-factor authentication can also be enabled to help keep kids safe online.

For more tools to help parents make informed decisions and support their children’s gaming experience, visit corp.roblox.com/safety.

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock (father and daughter playing video game)

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Our Lifestyle section on STM Daily News is a hub of inspiration and practical information, offering a range of articles that touch on various aspects of daily life. From tips on family finances to guides for maintaining health and wellness, we strive to empower our readers with knowledge and resources to enhance their lifestyles. Whether you’re seeking outdoor activity ideas, fashion trends, or travel recommendations, our lifestyle section has got you covered. Visit us today at https://stmdailynews.com/category/lifestyle/ and embark on a journey of discovery and self-improvement.