Home » Archives for kids

Posts tagged as:

kids

Stop blaming yourself for your kids’ challenges

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 [...]

Read more →

Make a family tech schedule

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 [...]

Read more →

Stop worrying about your kids’ online future

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 [...]

Read more →

5 online calendars your family can’t live without

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 [...]

Read more →

Can smartphones create stillness?

October 4, 2011
kindergarten kids

If you want to learn something about stillness, visit a kindergarten class. I spent about 45 minutes with Little Peanut and his classmates today, and it gave me a whole new perspective on quiet — or the lack thereof. In the half-hour in which these 19 kids were in their “quiet” circle, there wasn’t a [...]

Read more →

8 ways iPhones and iPads affect family discipline

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, [...]

Read more →

How will computer use affect the way people are wired?

September 12, 2011

I just finished taking the Future of the Internet survey that is run by the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project and Elon University’s Imagining the Internet Center. One of the questions asked about the impact of technology use on the kids and young people who will grow into the adults of tomorrow. [...]

Read more →

The 6th tech-inspired kid failure: autotunitis

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 [...]

Read more →

5 kid failures caused by technology

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 [...]

Read more →

Creating a family social media policy

May 26, 2011
3 girls using a computer

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.

Read more →

5 ways technology can reduce the family stress of business travel

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.

Read more →

← Previous Entries