Tag Archives: parenting

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…

Family Time with Apps is a free interactive guide for parents and caregivers that highlights some ways that families can use technology together. The book features comic strips that parents and children can enjoy together, as well as tips on selecting apps that can help turn screen time into family time. The guide provides tips on how using apps together can support a child’s learning and development. It is available from the iBook Store. We’re thrilled to share Jordan Shapiro’s…

We recently released Family Time with Apps: A Guide to Using Apps with Your Kids, a free interactive guide for parents and caregivers. The book features comic strips that parents and children can enjoy together, as well as tips on selecting apps that can help turn screen time into family time. Whether the challenge is preparing for a new experience like starting school, spending more time outside, connecting to distant loved ones, or reading together every day, the guide provides…

Can text messages to low-income parents help close the word gap? It’s not an idle question. Last month, the advocacy group Too Small to Fail announced plans to experiment with text messages to parents in a new partnership with Kaiser Permanente, Sesame Workshop,* and Text4Baby. In a recent blog post for Seeding Reading we reported on an initiative called Parent University that sends text messages to Head Start parents with suggestions for building literacy skills in their children. (We also reported on parents’ reactions to the project.)   A study…

When Alexiss Evans enrolled in the Ounce of Prevention Fund’s Parent University literacy program, she did so because she believed in the organization and because she wanted to give her daughter every possible opportunity to learn. “I’m one of those parents who, if [the Ounce says] something, I’ll do it,” she said. “I want to show support and be a team player.” Evans received text messages each weekday for six weeks. These texts suggested activities for Evans to do with her…

Last week I almost wrecked the imaginary birthday party my daughter was throwing for Strawberry Shortcake. I was sitting on the floor in her room next to Plum Puddin’, Lemon Meringue, Orange Blossom and a few other three-inch-tall plastic guests, when she looked up and casually asked: “What’s more, daddy, four and a half or five years?” I jumped up, got the wooden blocks out and started piling them up in five columns. I was hoping that the concreteness of…

It works with diabetes patients, smokers trying to quit, and others: a text message reminding you to take your medication or resist the urge to light up. There’s even a Persuasive Technology Lab at Stanford University devoted to the idea. So what if we could put that same idea to work boosting literacy in very young children in low-income families? That’s the premise of Parent University, a six-week program originally designed by Chris Drew, now Director of Educator Initiatives at…

On Tuesday, June 4, the Center on Media and Human Development Northwestern University released Parenting in a Digital Age: A National Survey. Alexis Lauricella, one of the report’s co-authors, shares some of the findings here.

The topic of kids and technology is a hot topic again. This would normally be a good thing, if the questions that are being discussed weren’t fundamentally the wrong ones. It is, however, a familiar situation. We are going through a normalization of a new technology, and it will be met in the same way that technology has been met before: with skepticism, doubt and the occasional hint of technophobia. Discussions like these cloud the interesting part—the choices that parents…