NetFamilyNews.orgA lot of unusually thoughtful points about parenting in our collective, global social media environment are made in this recent New York Times article: “Cyberparenting and the Risk of T.M.I.” Pamela Paul writes that, for this generation of teens, it’s not Big Brother so much as Big Mother and/or Big Father. “Yes, we know contemporary [...]
It could help increase the visibility of the very content people want deleted. Here, in a guest post for NetFamilyNews, is an account by Maureen Kochan, our director of community at ConnectSafely.org, of how that happens: By Maureen Kochan Many users of Facebook have come across questionable content on the site on occasion. Chances are [...]
A new study indicates that a lot of parents who monitor their kids online and on phones do so without their children knowing it. The study – “The Online Generation Gap,” just released by the Family Online Safety Institute (FOSI) – found that 70% of parents check the text messages on their teens’ phones, while [...]
With tablets showing up on more and more kids’ holiday wish lists (littler and littler kids!), parents will appreciate any help they can get with keep tablet use safe as well as fun. And there’s help over at TechHive, which reports that Amazon Kindle Fire HD, Barnes & Noble Nook HD, and Apple’s iPad, all [...]
Reflecting on a cellphone app developer’s claim, I’m thinking that tracking our kids’ movements, moment by moment, isn’t the best way to enhance “family awareness.” Those are the words of Chris Hull, CEO of the company that developed the Life360 tracking app, in an interview for Time. Is that “awareness” as in “surveillance”? Oddly, Time [...]
Shades of social media researcher danah boyd’s finding on teens’ “social steganography” (hiding in plain sight): The Daily reports (about halfway into a 2-min. video) that, because so many parents are now monitoring their kids on Facebook and checking their texts, “an enormous amount of teenagers” are using Instagram to take random photos just so [...]
Back in 2005, a friend in Massachusetts referred to his daughters’ constant instant messaging (remember that?!) as “a window into their lives that I wouldn’t have otherwise. [My daughter] leaves her computer on a table beside my desk, and I get to watch a bunch of this stuff happening. Sort of like me working while [...]
As mobile apps multiply like rabbits and the number of kids downloading and playing with them seems to keep growing, the usefulness of app ratings to parents seems to be growing too. CTIA – the mobile phone industry trade association – gets this. It recently announced an app rating system it has been working on [...]
…for now – until the blocking technology works with all browsers – families make it a rule that kids use Firefox and they download this plug-in for it: the MetaCert Add-on. Firefox is the only browser for which there’s a .xxx blocking tool, but that’s changing. It’ll work with Chrome, Safari, Internet Explorer, and Opera [...]
This is smart. Now, while you’re standing in a store aisle staring at a bunch of videogame titles – or right when your kid’s saying, “That’s it, that’s the game on my list, Mom/Dad!” – you can get details from the game-rating source on the spot, pretending you got a text message (feigning disinterest so [...]
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