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.
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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November 21, 2011
Print books may be under siege from the rise of e-books, but they have a tenacious hold on a particular group: children and toddlers. Their parents are insisting this next generation of readers spend their early years with old-fashioned books. This is the case even with parents who themselves are die-hard downloaders of books onto [...]
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September 15, 2011
There’s nothing like the beginning of a school year to illuminate gaps in your family’s, um….discipline. After a couple of rocky weeks inspired us to take a closer look at our family’s rhythms and regimes, I found myself noting the central role that iPhones and iPads have played in all aspects of our disciplinary approach, [...]
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August 22, 2011
Last week I wrote about 5 tech-related kid failures. I somehow managed to leave out the one that is currently the biggest source of irritation in our house: autotunitis. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the disorder, autotunitis is a vocal condition afflicting children whose exposure to music has been dominated by artists [...]
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August 18, 2011
Live by the sword, die by the sword. Today I’m brutally overtired because our 7-year-old kept us up for an hour in the middle of the night. Cause: nightmares inspired by the iPad game Plants vs. Zombies. If this feels like divine retribution for exposing my kids to brain-rotting video games, it’s far from the [...]
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