Tag Archives: parenting

Kimberly Voll is a game developer, researcher, and co-founder of the Fair Play Alliance. In this episode, Kimberly joins Laura and Jordan to talk about her earliest experiences with video games, her interest in artificial intelligence, understanding games as social ecosystems, and the challenges of combating toxicity in digital spaces.

This transcript of the Into the Digital Future podcast provides has been edited for clarity. Please listen to the full episode here and learn more about the series here. Alicia is the Head of Kids and Families Strategy at YouTube, where she focuses on helping children and their parents and caregivers realize their rights to more safely learn, connect, and play online. She was previously the Public Policy Lead for Kids and Families at Google, where she worked on issues…

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…

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…

Throughout the past year, everyone has experienced pandemic stress. But parents have been particularly vulnerable because of the additional work associated with managing children, especially for those parents trying to continue to work at their jobs. There have been many new studies about the ways that pandemic stress has impacted parents’ mental health. While people turn to a variety of tools to cope with pandemic stress, our study focuses on using entertainment media, specifically video games, as a coping tool. Using…

With children growing up in ever-changing conditions in the digital age, digital parenting becomes more crucial than ever before. The predominant focus for parents, policy-makers, and researchers has long been on minimizing the risk of harm. Yet the swift transition to children’s online learning during lockdown caught many off guard. Children from disadvantaged families struggle to get online due to a lack of device or internet connectivity. Safety issues such as online child pornography are also in the spotlight. In…

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…

I have been a pediatrician in inner-city Boston for over 45 years. During my residency, I  was trained to diagnose and treat children with acute and chronic medical problems.  Over time, I realized that was not enough to help children be healthy, happy, and do well in school. I learned that the best way I could help children achieve these goals is by helping their parents, and that the best way to reach parents is through their children. An “a-ha”…