Tag Archives: parenting

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…

“For me, my kids playing Halo is no different than playing outside and coming up with scenarios that seem kind of violent like our kids… they could be outside playing Nerf guns and pretending to shoot each other and die. I can go outside and play Nerf guns with my kids and we can be playing in the neighborhood. And I don’t get questioned about that, but I get questioned about Halo.” —Abigail, a mother of four daughters Between the…

Imagine: a young child looks up at an adult expectantly and hands them a book. It’s hard to say no to a simple request like that, so the adult settles down next to the child and dives into the story. When we break this adult-child book-reading interaction down, there are many elements that vary. For example: The physical proximity and orientation of the adult and child. Is the child sitting in the adult’s lap? Are they next to each other at a…

A few years ago, the Cooney Center released Family Time with Apps and Apps en familia, a guide that shares tips for parents and caregivers on finding and using apps to develop stronger connections and learning opportunities with young children. The original e-book, which is available for free on the iBook store in both English and Spanish, received a particularly enthusiastic response from librarians around the country, who urged us to create a shorter form, bilingual version of the electronic publication they could share with the…

When I was a kid, one of my favorite parts of the week was the recurring Friday night game session at my house. It usually consisted of my dad stoking the fire, my sister watching TV, and my mom and me embroiled in a fierce competition of Chinese Checkers or Othello. There may have been times I fumed while resetting the board pieces (I was not a good loser), but I always enjoyed those game nights and still hold onto those…

During my teaching career, I taught pre-K in high-poverty areas in the District of Columbia, but I also taught for a year in a high-income, suburban area in Maryland. There was a stark difference in students’ vocabulary and background knowledge. Most of my students from a low-income background didn’t have the breadth of vocabulary that some of my higher income students possessed. Although this was my own personal experience, it is backed up by research which says that by the…