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 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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June 3, 2011
When I first wrote this post in October 2006, LilPnut was only a few months old, and didn’t even have his twitter handle yet. (Who can blame him? Twitter had barely been invented.) Almost five years later we have lots more experience traveling with the kids, and are much less ambitious about integrating business and [...]
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May 30, 2011
This weekend Little Sweetie asked whether she can have my computer when I die. I had to explain that she is unlikely to want it: by the time I die, my current computer will be useless. “But how about this,” I suggested instead. “When I die, you can have whatever computer I have at the [...]
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May 26, 2011
The ongoing conversation in our home about how to use social media — and in particular, how to do so in a way that is both safe and enjoyable for our kids — has helped us evolve a de facto social media policy governing how we engage with social media as a family. I decided it was time to go from de facto to actual, recorded policy. Use our policy as a jumping-off point for your own.
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May 11, 2011
When you’ve got kids, business travel is especially stressful. It’s hard for them to have mum or dad away, and it’s hard for you to miss them. Here are 5 ways that technology can help.
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May 1, 2011
“What did kids do before there were iPads?” our kids asked us last week. This question was astonishing not just as an indicator of how central the iPad has become to our family life, but of how incredibly short our kids’ memories are. “What do you mean, ‘kids’?” I replied. “What did you guys do [...]
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April 30, 2011
Wondering how you can get your kids to think about the pros and cons of social media and social networking? This fairy tale introduces the joys of life online and the stakes of choosing between different online communities.
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April 25, 2011
A few years ago somebody broke into our office and stole a couple of new-in-box hard drives, a giant cake knife and a colleague’s little Cambodian Buddha. I figure the stolen Buddha pretty much guarantees the thief will get his karmic retribution, but that didn’t ease the sting of losing one other, deeply sentimental possession. [...]
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