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Parenting advice from a non-parent

April 5, 2013 By Anne Leave a Comment

It’s fine for people who aren’t parents to weigh in on parenting-these-days – aunts, uncles, grandparents, and children do all the time – but why market your article or post as a non-parent? Anyway, columnist Frank Bruni at the New York Times did. I agree with some of what he wrote (that parenting these days is pretty over-thunk), really like some of it (I’ll get to that in a minute), and find some of the clever writerliness pretty annoying, some of it sounding like “Grumpy Old Man” on Saturday Night Live a couple of decades ago. Remember when comedian Dana Carvey played him? Don’t you think Grumpy Old Man was amazingly foresighted (and plays in our heads to this day) when, for example, he said (as I found in Hulu)…

“In my day, we didn’t have TV. We had radio, and you couldn’t see anything. And it was primitive and lousy, and … that’s the way it was and we LIKED it!… Today, everybody’s spoiled rotten. When I was a boy, we didn’t have these videogames. We made up our own games, like ‘Chew the Bark Off the Tree.’ You and your friends would find a nice oak tree and start chewin’ the skin off of it, and there were no winners. Everybody was a loser, rotting your teeth … and that’s the way it was, and [pounds fist on table] we LIKED it. We LOVED it!”

The part of Bruni’s article I really liked was where he suggests that parents cut themselves some slack. Even with “digital footprints,” I so agree that “no one false step … is going to consign your children to an entirely different future [yes, even in a digital age]. Make sure that they know they’re loved.” There actually is no better parenting advice than that last sentence, no matter who it comes from, whether technology’s a factor or not – just to state the obvious. Love is parents’ and kids’ source code.

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Filed Under: Parenting Tagged With: digital age, digital footprints, Frank Bruni, generations, Parenting, parents, Social Media

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2016 TEDx Talk on
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IMPORTANT RESOURCES

Our (DIGITAL) PARENTING BASICS: Safety + Social
NAMLE, the National Association for Media Literacy Education
CASEL.org & the 5 core social-emotional competencies of SEL
Center for Democracy & Technology
Center for Innovative Public Health Research
Childnet International
Committee for Children
Congressional Internet Caucus Academy
ConnectSafely.org
Control Shift: a pivotal book for Internet safety
Crimes Against Children Research Center
Crisis Textline
Cyber Civil Rights Initiative's Revenge Porn Crisis Line
Cyberwise.org
danah boyd's blog and book about networked youth
Disconnected, Carrie James's book on digital ethics
FOSI.org's Good Digital Parenting
The research of Global Kids Online
The Good Project at Harvard's School of Education
If you watch nothing else: "Parenting in a Digital Age" TED Talk by Prof. Sonia Livingstone
The International Bullying Prevention Association
Let Grow Foundation
Making Caring Common
Raising Digital Natives, author Devorah Heitner's site
Renee Hobbs at the Media Education Lab
MediaSmarts.ca
The New Media Literacies
Report of the Aspen Task Force on Learning & the Internet and our guide to Creating Trusted Learning Environments
The Ruler Approach to social-emotional learning (Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence)
Sources of Strength
"Young & Online: Perspectives on life in a digital age" from young people in 26 countries (via UNICEF)
"Youth Safety on a Living Internet": 2010 report of the Online Safety & Technology Working Group (and my post about it)

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