For some kids in North Carolina, the school year started only to be abruptly halted. Hurricane Florence tore through their communities three weeks ago, but the situation has yet to return to normal.
Keeping your kid’s mind sharp might involve making sure they don’t spend all day on their smartphone or other screen devices, suggests yet more research published this week.
Prior to developing the capacity for speech, toddlers communicate their desires, demands, and discontent using a diverse repertoire of physical gestures. As a new study shows, there’s a significant amount of overlap between the gestures employed by human children and those made by other ape species, a finding that’s…
It’s easy to feel smug around kids. You might not have it all together—you might, in fact, be rapidly disintegrating professionally and psychologically—but at least you can spill some apple juice without wailing inconsolably for six hours. Comparatively terrible things happen to you all the time, and you don’t freak…
New research shows that children are more likely than adults to give in to peer pressure from robots, a disturbing finding given the rapidly increasing rate at which kids are interacting with socially intelligent machines.
Most of us know that spending too much time at loud rock concerts can be bad for our hearing later on. But a new study published Thursday in JAMA Otolaryngology–Head & Neck Surgery suggests that kids as young as nine can be at risk of hearing loss from an unexpected source: their smartphones and tablets.
State laws that mandate universal background checks for buying guns and ammunition may save young lives, suggests new research presented this week at the annual meeting of the Pediatric Academic Societies. The study found that states with stricter gun laws had lower rates of gun-related deaths among children compared…
Thousands of apps may be tracking the online activity of children in ways that violate US privacy laws, according to a recent survey of Android apps available on the Google Play store.
In guidelines produced last year, the American Academy of Pediatrics advised parents to limit screen time to one to two hours a day for children between the ages of two and five years. New research suggests these recommendations aren’t producing the desired psychological benefits, and that the AAP’s recommendations…
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.
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.
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,…
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…