Tag Archives: digital media

On July 29, 2020, the Joan Ganz Cooney Center hosted a virtual book release party for our friends Sonia Livingstone and Alicia Blum-Ross, authors of Parenting for a Digital Future. We invited Anya Kamenetz, an education reporter for NPR and the author of The Art of Screen Time, to join us in a conversation about the challenges and opportunities that parents navigate as they raise children in a digital landscape. “The digital has become the terrain on which we negotiate…

Let me set the scene. You’ve been invited to a roundtable conversation with 17 international thought leaders working at the intersection of child development, early learning and children’s media. As you look around the table, you see influential early childhood educators, researchers, academics, pediatricians, children’s media producers, advocates and policy experts. It is immediately clear that these leaders and innovators share a commitment to young children and child development first, technology second. Milton Chen, senior fellow at the George Lucas…

Asha and her 6-year-old daughter, Zara, take deep breaths and blow onto the sails of their sail cars. The cars roll away…quickly at first before slowing to a stop. Zara cheers and exclaims, “I won! Mine went farthest!” Asha agrees and asks, “What was your prediction?” Zara reflects and grabs a yardstick, “Well, I thought it would go 16 inches. But it went a lot more.” She measures the distance and proudly announces, “25 inches!” Asha is impressed at the…

Young adults face many options when they go online—they might learn a new skill or lurk on a Discord channel; make a new friend or mock an existing one; create content or consume it. My research focuses on why young women choose to pursue positive opportunities new technology offers instead of risky or harmful activities. To answer this question, I analyzed the results from two large scale surveys of British teenagers, ran a quasi-experiment with 100 American teenagers attending a…

I must confess, I’d never given much thought to the origin of sandboxes. I played in them, my kids play in them, and so I just assumed that children have been building crumbling castles and holes to China since time immemorial. After reading Jordan Shapiro’s The New Childhood: Raising Kids To Thrive in a Connected World, I now have a newfound appreciation for the history and social impact of the playground mainstay. Originally called sand-piles, sandboxes debuted in German public…

So many of today’s parents complain that their children spend too much time staring at “addictive screens.” According to the grownups, kids never want to do anything else and therefore, they’re losing out on the real joy of childhood. But the statistics tell a different story. On average, today’s kids get roughly the same amount of screen time as their parents did. The only difference is the kind of screen. The previous generation watched cartoons on the television. Now, kids…

Finn Caspian is a human boy living in outer space.  He and his friends (both human and robot) have lots of incredible adventures across the galaxy in this serially-told podcast, but the big personality of the robot co-host steals the show. The show also has brilliant ways of incorporating listeners’ participation in the production through listener-submitted jokes, art, and sound clips. Carissa Christner: Where do you make your recordings? (at home? in a studio?) Jonathan Messinger: For Finn Caspian I do…

Last month, researchers AnneMarie McClain and Lacey Hilliard presented some exciting findings from a a study they conducted around classroom media and socio-emotional learning among elementary school students at the International Communication Association Conference in Prague. We invited them to share details of the project as well as the findings that emerged from their investigation.    At the May 2018 International Communication Association Conference in Prague, Czech Republic, we presented some findings from our longitudinal study, the Arthur Interactive Media (AIM)…

Sonia Livingstone was recently asked to write the foreword for Children and Families in the Digital Age: Learning Together in a Media Saturated Culture edited by Elisabeth Gee, Lori M. Takeuchi, and Ellen Wartella. Here’s what she had to say. Where shall we start, and where shall we focus our gaze, when making sense of the influx of digital devices that fill our homes and workplace, absorbing the attention of both children and parents, promising so much yet often proving frustrating,…

How did I become a researcher on children, families, and digital media? In September 2013, I started as a Cooney Center Research Fellow, trying to find my way in the world. I was just completing my Ph.D. at the University of Maryland, College Park and had done a dissertation on the development of science ownership in children as they engaged in social media use for science learning. One of the insights from my doctoral work was that the families in my…