Category Archives: Commentary

What are Child Rights in our digital world? Sonia Livingstone is working to ensure a balanced approach to design and policy to allow kids to make the most of opportunities afforded by technology while protecting them. Balance might mean weighing risks of being online with opportunities for learning, or finding approaches to parenting that let the family strike a balance with digital spaces and face-to-face experiences.

This transcript of the Into the Digital Future podcast provides excerpts of the conversation that have been edited for clarity. Please listen to the full episode here.  Dr. Jenny Radesky is a Developmental Behavioral Pediatrician and Assistant Professor of Pediatrics at the University of Michigan Medical School.  She received her M.D. from Harvard Medical School, trained at Seattle Children’s Hospital and Boston Medical Center, and her clinical work focuses on autism, ADHD, and advocacy.  Her NIH-funded research focuses on the…

When it comes to raising healthy and smart kids in the digital age, there really are no easy answers. Parents are often the gatekeepers or guides of our kids’ relationships with technology—and it’s so easy to be overwhelmed by warnings about the dangers of screen time that it can be difficult to think about how to steer them towards safe and healthy digital experiences. But parents are not alone. Policy makers, pediatricians, tech industry leaders, and researchers are working to…

With the recent announcement of the new umbrella name “Meta,” the Facebook/Instagram/WhatsApp behemoth is shifting its place of business to the “metaverse.” It seems timely, then, to consider what we mean when we use that term and, particularly, how it can be made transformative and beneficial for children and teens. There is, as yet, no true metaverse, so it’s early enough that all stakeholders can shape a positive trajectory. In Dubit’s vision, we might start by imagining the metaverse as…

Like many digital learning products, Sago Mini provides tools to engage parents in their child’s play experience. However, unlike most similar products, you won’t find a single chart, graph, score, or badge that measures your child’s success.  It’s well-established in the industry that while parents often express an interest in having dashboards that track their child’s learning, very few actually use them. With that in mind, it was with some caution that we began to explore the idea for a…

The effort to find creative solutions to reach our under-connected, undercounted, underrepresented, and underserved neighbors, especially children, families, and seniors, during a global pandemic can inspire changes in the way we work. This time in which we live is issuing a challenge to us— to reach into the digital divide as much as we hope to reach across it. “Internet infrastructure is, of course, an essential element of the divide, but infrastructure alone does not necessarily translate into adoption and…

PBS NewsHour Student Reporting Labs (SRL) launched On Our Minds with Noah+Zion, a limited-run podcast series on teen mental health this spring. Over a series of five episodes, 16-year-old hosts Noah Konevitch of Lebanon, Pennsylvania and Zion Williams of Clinton Township, Michigan, explored various mental health challenges affecting today’s teens, and shared coping mechanisms from mental health experts. The Cooney Center caught up with Noah and Zion this summer to find out what they learned about making a podcast for the…

In Spring 2020, as schools around the United States were forced to turn to remote learning methods, a number of research teams around the country mobilized to study how families were adjusting to the pandemic. In July 2020, Dr. Brigid Barron and her team at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Education and the Joan Ganz Cooney Center convened a virtual workshop with research teams from Stanford, University of Washington, and the University of Michigan to explore innovative methods for studying…

“While new technology is connecting us to each other in different and much faster ways, these changes will necessarily have a knock-on effect to how we interact with one another, how younger generations open up to new cultures and ideas, and how we interpret this cultural Tower of Babel from one era to the next.” –Julian Vigo (Forbes, 2019) Generation Z, born mainly between 1997 and 2010, inhabit a world with 24/7/365 access to on-demand media, social media, mobile devices,…

Zoom school may be over for most of us, but many of our children will continue to spend more time online each week than they do in physical schools. Digital devices in the hands of today’s teens and tweens are here to stay. We need to start investing in the digital infrastructure that undergirds their development, in the same way we invest in our younger children’s daycares and playgrounds. I will explain why. Adolescents are connecting more online For close…