Tag: CHILDREN

If Gartner is to be believed, we are nearing the end of the keyboard and mouse age and entering one ruled by touch screens. According to Gartner, 50-percent of all the computers purchased between now and 2015 by children currently 15 and younger will have touchscreens. The study goes on to say that consumers and educational markets will be the first big adopters of the technology, as older workers ...

Five years ago, the Kaiser Family Foundation conducted a survey that determined kids between the ages of 8 and 18 spent a whopping 6.5 hours a day on the Internet. According to the New York Times, one of the study's researchers initially thought that the usage statistics could not possibly increase in the future because of a lack of "enough hours in the day." The Foundation recently ...

Babies these days just can't catch a break. When parents aren't turning their infants into LOLCats, they're posting every waking moment (literally) of their existence to the Internet for the whole world to go gaga over. Or, every now and then, they're dumb enough to publish photos so scandalous that social services comes a-knocking. The BBC reports that police in Essex, U.K. have undertaken a ...

For whatever reason, parents nowadays seem more intent than ever on shackling their kids with GPS tracking devices. The latest product to add to the growing list of toddler house arrest devices is something called the Pikavu Express Locator. It's a spinoff of an earlier rendition, called the Keruve GPS Tracker, which was designed to corral the wandering elderly suffering from Alzheimer's. The ...

Googling yourself can be daunting. Some people are morbidly afraid of what they might find, and others fear disappointment with what they don't find. But every now and then, self-googling can return the kind of life-changing results you never thought possible. In a story that is pretty much destined to be made into a movie (albeit a Lifetime one), according to the Huffington Post, a Georgia ...

Facebook is great for staying in touch with people or reconnecting with lost friends or family. Apparently, though, it's the perfect forum for incestuous innuendo, too. In a case that would make even John Phillips blush, a Lancaster County, Pennsylvania man has been accused of sexually propositioning his own estranged 13-year-old daughter on Facebook. 39-year-old John Forehand was one of five ...

Tuesday night's Philadelphia Phillies game featured fan Steve Monforto making an amazing catch of a foul ball. Even better, his adorable little daughter was along for the game, and it was all caught on video. Being a good dad and all, Monforto handed his daughter what was probably her first foul ball, and she promptly tossed it over the upper-deck railing (typical Philadelphia sports fan). ...

Cell phones on the playground? Toddlers text messaging? These could become much more common sites sight. Despite warnings about potential health risks, an Irish cell phone company has developed a cell phone line marketed towards children as young as four-years-old, according to The Daily Mail. The Firefly comes in bright colors and features just five buttons -- including one to call Mom and one ...

Computers, reports the BBC this morning, are dangerous to children. Not because of online predators, brain rot, or decreasing attention spans, but, according to a new study appearing in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, because of kids physically hurting themselves near their home offices. In what seems to be painfully obvious, researchers at Nationwide Children's Hospital Center for ...

Called mind-melting, violence-inducing time-killers, video games have gotten a pretty bad rap. Often overlooked are the potential advantages to having an immersive (and fun) entertainment experience. Yet, the Economist is now reporting that several different findings to be released this summer all that suggest "pro-social" games, or those that aren't based on blowing up or gunning down, ...

It's bad enough that your kids can spend all day window shopping and bargain hunting online. They ask you to buy them things, send you links to Amazon at work, and are generally just huge pains in the butt. Sometimes you probably wish you could just give them your credit card and get it over with. Well, handing over your plastic is a pretty terrible idea, but thanks to BillMyParents, there's ...

LeapFrog's been very busy of late -- they recently added Tag Junior to their line of edutainment products for the wee ones --and now there's this. The Text and Learn children's "PDA" hasn't been officially announced yet, but details are slipping out from the U.K. Toy Fair, so here's what we know about the must-have device of the year: boasting a full QWERTY keyboard, the Text and Learn has a ...

Some good news and some bad news: According to a recent survey, television now accounts for less than half of children's viewing time (its major competition coming in the form of computer gaming and Internet-ing on the computer). The bad news? The total time that kids spend in front of screens is still nearly six hours a day. A survey of 1800 kids in Britain, ages five to 16 years old, was ...

A task force -- created by 49 state attorneys general and headed by the Berkman Center for Internet and Society -- at Harvard University has found the online threat to children from sexual predators is actually quite overblown. The task force was charged with examining potential threats on social networks like MySpace and Facebook. The report found that online communities actually mirrored ...

LEGO's just announced that it's teamed with Digital Blue to bring out a line of digital cameras, PMPs, and walkie talkies for children. As you can see, the products will have the familiar "LEGO" look to them (though not constructed out of actual bricks), and though we haven't heard anything in the way of specs yet, they're said to be arriving this summer with prices ranging from $19 - $60. Our ...