More tech support for:
Family
Facebook your kids? Tweet your granny? E-mail your sister? However you want to connect with (or avoid) your family members, networks can help. This page has inspiration, strategies and advice on how to harness technology to creating the family relationships you want.
You’ll find that a lot of these articles reflect my current stage of life as the mother of two young kids. But I also round up news about how Facebook, FourSquare, Twitter and other social media tools affect teens, aging parents and other family dynamics.
November 20, 2012
Hey, old people! By which I mean: hey, people my age! If you’ve been wondering what dating wisdom you can usefully impart to your teenage or soon-to-be teenage kids, you should read Stephanie Martin’s thoughtful post on Dating in the Social Media Age. Stephanie writes: Before, during, and even after dating someone we will all nonchalantly [...]
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August 8, 2012
How Facebook can help you plan a better trip — and help you remember it.
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June 4, 2012
Learning multiplication tables ought to be a lot easier — or at least a lot more fun — in the age of the iPad and iPhone. That’s why I’d love someone to write a blog post rounding up different multiplication table apps.
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June 2, 2012
Wanted: a search tool that evaluates the search engine visibility of your prospective married name, or the name you are considering for your baby.
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April 30, 2012
Tonight Little Sweetie was thrilled to learn that she has been accepted into the Vancouver Maker Faire, a DIY festival we attended last year. She loved it, and immediately wanted to run her own booth, based on her Etsy store, 2 Dots 1 Symbol, which sells emoticon jewelry. Her Etsy store has been a great [...]
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April 13, 2012
Today’s practice: Focus on healing your kids, not on figuring out how you’ve damaged them. In the past year a number of very important and dear people in our lives have started or grown their families in a way not everybody knows is possible: by adopting kids who have been living in foster care. In [...]
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April 11, 2012
Today’s practice: Make a family tech schedule. We recently took the bold, terrifying step of pulling all the gaming consoles (Xbox, Playstation and Wii) out of our home media center, and sending them on a vacation to the closet. We took this measure in response to our kid’s increasing obsession with video gaming, and on [...]
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February 29, 2012
I’m one of more than a thousand Internet experts who contributed thoughts about our emergent digital world to the 2012 Elon University-Pew Internet & American Life study on the future of the Internet. My comments were picked up in the Globe and Mail and MindShift, where I got to carry the banner for the pro-digital side of [...]
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February 9, 2012
If you think online calendaring is for scheduling business meetings, appointments and the occasional lunch date, you’re missing out. Online calendars can also be a great way to bring order to the chaos of family life — if you create or subscribe to the essential calendars that will keep your family happy and functional. Here [...]
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December 20, 2011
[O]n the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog, which liberates you to be a bitch. Not a bitch to others — …online mothers’ groups are quick to sanction hostility — but the impatient, imperfect bitch of a mom uses jarred babyfood, disposable diapers and a TV-as sitter. The mom who takes off the halo and [...]
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November 30, 2011
If you have never been more than 39 weeks pregnant, you may be under the impression that the human gestation period lasts 40 weeks. Hah! 40 weeks, it turns out, is kind of a rough overage. Some babies need to cook for a bit longer. Some babies need to cook a bit less. But when [...]
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