Touchscreen devices like smartphones and tablets are now fixtures of many households, so it comes as little surprise to learn that young children who don’t work or go to school are among their most active users. In the first study of its kind, researchers have learned that infants and toddlers who spend more time on…
A German court has ruled on a copyright infringement case that dates back to 2011 and the verdict has disturbing consequences for parents. The ruling found that parents must identify their child by name as the one responsible for downloading a torrent or they will be held responsible for the violation.
Kaptain Kristian’s latest explainer video is a fun one: he explains how the anapestic tetrameter rhyming style of Dr. Seuss helped us better understand language as kids, all while rhyming in the video himself. It’s stupid catchy (obviously, because it’s done in the style of Dr. Seuss) and so easy to listen to, which…
How much time should kids be allowed to stare into their screens like zombies? New guidelines issued by the American Academy of Pediatrics upturns conventional thinking on the matter, showing that a sweeping one-size-fits-all approach is not the right way for parents to go about limiting their children’s screen time.
Mike Lanza, a dad and tech entrepreneur from Menlo Park, California, thinks we’re experiencing a crisis in child-rearing: Boys aren’t allowed to play rough or run free, and moms hover nervously at the margins of children’s social worlds, chirping reminders about sharing and playing nice. The result, he explains in a…
Japan’s birth rate has been on decline for some time now, so engineers at Toyota have come up with an ingenious solution to help people apparently feel the companionship of kids: an annoying robot.
You’ve already taken your summer trip, it’s too hot to do anything outside, and the kids are tired of the library. It’s the perfect time for at-home science experiments. These five experiments are fun even if you don’t have kids, but if you do, there’s even more reason to spend an afternoon exploring science.
There’s a common refrain among people of a certain age: “Wow, I’m really glad I wasn’t a teenager in the age of smartphones and Snapchat.” They’re not wrong. After polling over 10,000 18-year-olds from 25 different countries, a new UNICEF study confirms that being a teen online these days is fraught with risk, danger,…
If you’re having trouble sleeping, melatonin is a popular and easy remedy. It’s effective for many people, doesn’t have any serious safety issues, and is available as pills or gummies for pennies a dose. It’s also misunderstood, though: melatonin is not a traditional sleeping pill.
Getting kids to code is a great idea—but it’s not always easy. Now a team of researchers from Harvard has developed this little robot, called Root, that’s designed to make writing code a more tangible experience.
Kids are great, aren’t they? But you don’t necessarily want them using all of the apps, viewing all of the websites, and tweaking all of the system settings that a grown-up has access to. Windows, OS X, and Chrome OS each have tools for creating child-friendly accounts—here’s how to set them up.
The “NO SCREENS UNTIL 2” guideline issued by the American Academy of Pediatrics in 2011 has practically inscribed itself onto the foreheads of new parents. Now, the AAP says its position has “evolved,” and released a more nuanced set of guidelines when it comes to babies and screen-based media.
Celebrities visiting a hospital has been a cool thing to do for a while now: Christian Bale and Chris Pratt have been known to stop by to cheer up kids. The latest feel-good story comes with the new cast of Ghostbusters, who stopped by Floating Hospital for Children at Tufts Medical Center in Boston yesterday.
This sounds extreme, but first let me ask: how many parents do you think actually keep track of their kids’ screen time? If the TV is on but one of the children wanders out of the room, does that count? What if they’re following along to a yoga video? What if the kid borrows Mom’s phone at dinner to ask Google what…
One of my most vivid childhood memories is of a county park behind our house which was so vast to my eight-year-old mind that it might as well have been the Arctic tundra. We were constructing some kind of vine-swing over a creek, which I believe we planned to test on bikes. There were no parents anywhere.
Before you sic the No Fun Federation of Parenting onto Jorge Tirado, an awesome dad and surfer, just look at how much fun his 9-month-old baby who was apparently born for the thirst of the ocean is having. And just think about how awesome he's going to be when he grows up after having such crazy experiences.
In the early '80s, the state-sponsored British Broadcasting Corporation decided that computers were going to be kind of a big deal, and created the BBC Micro desktop PC to promote computer literacy. Now, they're doing it again—this fall, one million UK schoolkids will receive a free Micro Bit.
The public service announcement is emotionally manipulative and strategically pulls at the most basic things everyone likes (cute kids! young love!) and might even be scripted and is definitely edited nicely but still, the message is something that even children know to be true: Domestic violence is not okay.
Here's a cute video that I hope turns into an entire series: imagining what's inside a kid's, well, imagination. The video starts off with the toddler waving a stick as he runs around (as kids tend to do) and then transforms into a level of Super Mario Bros. Being a kid is awesome. We just see the stick, they see…
