Tag Archives: parenting

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”…

Balancing working from home, schooling from home, playing at home, and just having the entire family at home during these times can be a challenge. For families who have dedicated voice assistants, like the Echo or Google Home, there might be some strategies parents can use to help augment their parenting tasks during these times of social distancing and sheltering in place. I was a member of a research team which investigated how families adopt and use smart speakers, like…

With Sesame Street: Ready for School! A Parent’s Guide to Playful Learning for Children Ages 2 to 5, Dr. Rosemarie Truglio shares the research-based, curriculum-directed school readiness skills that have made Sesame Street the preeminent children’s television program for the past 50 years. The book features eight chapters on key areas of learning and child development, including language, literacy, math, science, logic & reasoning, social & emotional development, healthy habits, and the arts, and offers hands-on activities to help parents incorporate playful…

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…

As media and technology have an increasing presence in our lives, more parents are seeking guidance in how to select the best media for their little ones. That has been the case for many parents who have participated in the national Abriendo Puertas/Opening Doors program. They have expressed their worries and struggles with the topic. Often, they don’t even know where to start as they grapple with concerns about how media and tech could have a negative impact on their…

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…