Tag Archives: families

Today’s announcement by the American Academy of Pediatrics and the joint statement of the U.S. Department of Education and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services on “media use and young minds” is a timely response to a hot debate in parenting and early childhood circles: When and how often should young children use screens? For years, the health and child development establishment has advised against exposing toddlers, and babies in particular, to screen media.  But daily life has…

Over the past several years, New America and the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop have become known for our book Tap, Click, Read and for our joint research and analysis on how digital technologies could be used to improve, instead of impede, early literacy.  Now our two organizations are going a step further: This month we are releasing a toolkit of materials designed to help educators and other leaders put these insights into practice to help children learn…

This month we’re kicking off a series of posts on media mentorship, a term coined by Lisa Guernsey in 2014. We’re thrilled to have Claudia Haines and Cen Campbell, authors of the recently released Becoming a Media Mentor: A Guide for Working with Children and Families, share their expertise as librarians. Have you been to your local public library lately? On any given day, all across the country, something amazing happens. Herds of young children, caregivers in tow, tumble through…

My kids are so lucky. Not only because they have my husband and me as parents (ha), but because they have the luxury of all their immediate family members within driving distance. Grandparents, cousins, aunts and uncles are around for family gatherings, holidays and birthday celebrations. Certainly a luxury I didn’t grow up with.

Our new report, Digital Media and Latino Families, takes stock of recent research that reveals widening use of digital media by Latino children, along with the multifaceted effects on their learning and their families. We find, empirically speaking, that the much discussed “digital divide” no longer hampers Latino families, as parents continue to buy mobile devices and computers shared with their children. But we also found that Latino parents report their children use electronic tools less often for school work or…

Learning at Home author Vicky Rideout speaks about some of the key findings from the report. Special thanks to 360Kid for this video.

** The results of this survey are now available in the Digital Games and Family Life infographic series ** Back in 2012, the Joan Ganz Cooney Center embarked on a multi-stakeholder game design project, also known as “Hard Fun: Learning Mathematics,” funded by the NSF with lead designers at E-Line Media and premier researchers in neuroscience from University of Rochester and Johns Hopkins University. The goal was to design and research an educational game that both parents and kids would…

This past Saturday, October 6, kids in over 30 countries in 6 continents participated in the Global Cardboard Challenge, the next chapter from the folks that brought you the short film “Caine’s Arcade.”  The fanfare around the film, featuring a 9 year-old Hispanic boy named Caine’s elaborate handmade cardboard arcade, was the impetus for the formation of the Imagination Foundation.  The non-profit, founded by “Caine’s Arcade” filmmaker Nirvan Mullick, aims to “help find, fund, and foster creativity and entrepreneurship in…

What makers of technology for early education can learn from Sesame Street. Whether you’re at a restaurant or on an airplane, you can’t miss changes in adult-child interactions from just a generation ago. Everyone is plugged in. It seems almost quaint to see kids and adults engaged together in screen-free play. Four-year-olds now consume three hours of media per day, and fourth graders more than five hours. And it is not just youth—adults are also increasingly finding it difficult to turn off…

Just over a week ago, I had the pleasure of assisting members of the Cooney Center staff in a two-day research study at the New York Hall of Science (NYSCI) in Queens, NY. The study, conducted in corroboration with NYSCI, focused on the interaction between children (ages 3-5) and their caregivers when reading two different science books: one regular book and one on the iPad. Would the iPad serve as a distraction to children or would it actually promote as…