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.

10 ways your smartphone will help you travel with kids

It was 9:15 a.m., and the Eiffel Tower had barely opened for the day. Nonetheless, we faced a 90-minute line-up before our two young kids — ages 4 and 6, respectively — would get to take the trip up the tower that they had been begging for since the moment we landed in Paris. But [...]

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Family movie night: The 2×2

Like everything in life, the conundrum that is Family Movie Night can be reduced to a 2×2 table. Common Sense Media has solved a lot of our household media selection challenges, but it’s yet to resolve this one. Movie selection criteria Your kids will find this movie Appropriate Inappropriate Interesting Movies with animals that can [...]

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The upside to teen life online

Frankasaurus has a great blog post about her experiences growing up online, comparing the impact of chat rooms on a socially awkward teenagers with the experience of using social media today. As she writes about her early years in online chat: It wasn’t long before I went from chatting with friends and total strangers to [...]

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At Oprah.com

The network path to Dad’s heart

Father’s Day may be behind us, but it’s not too late to show Dad what he means to you. And if the dad in your home is as geeky as the dad in our home, technology may be the best way to reconnect. My husband is an avid digital photographer who shoots hundreds of pictures [...]

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Discovering family through a social media crisis

My latest blog post for Harvard Business Review tackles the challenge of surviving a social media emergency. It was inspired by what turned out to be a minor emergency: the earthquake that rattled most of central Canada yesterday. As it happened, I was in Ottawa at the time — and in the office of Public [...]

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A techsperiment that puts family tech use in a new light

Last week we conducted a techsperiment on eliminating gadgets from our family time: we swore off using iPhones, iPads and computers from the time we got home (5 or 6) until the time the kids were asleep (8 or 9). We did pretty well during the week, and discovered that our family time was more [...]

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Techsperiment days 3 & 4: going out without Twitter

Our effort at keeping devices off during family time — roughly three hours a night — continues. The biggest challenge of day 4 came when I realized it was 5 pm, and I’d yet to log day 3. Would I grant myself an exception, and blog for a few minutes so that day 3 would get [...]

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5 questions that will change how your grown (or little) kid thinks about technology

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Day 2 of our New York Times-inspired techsperiment: can we go without iPhones, iPads and computers for our three hours of family time each night? The day brought a new challenge in the form of a comment on my blog, from my own mother: I’m thrilled to learn from this blog post that you’re trying [...]

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Techsperiment day 1: the difficulty of unplugging with kids

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24 hours into our vow to unplug — for just 3 hours a day! — and I am the weakest link. We’ve sworn to give up computers, iPhones and iPads between 6-9 every night (“family time”) but it’s day one and I’m already struggling. And that’s after our daughter did a good job reinforcing our [...]

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How to unplug as a parent: a techsperiment

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Last week’s New York Times piece on kids who are exasperated by their parents’ constant emailing, phoning and twittering hit close to home. “What’s more important,” our daughter is known to ask. “Your iPhone, or your children?” Along with plenty of talk about the downsides of wired parenting, the article includes a couple of interesting practices. [...]

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The best site for reviews of kids’ games & movies now has apps too!

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A few friends have recently asked me for iPhone app recommendations for kids. My friend Annemarie took suggestions from me and others, and wrote up a fantastic list of iPhone apps for kids and parents on yoyomama. I shared my own list of 12 iPhone apps for toddlers and young kids, and suggested a few [...]

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