Tag: PARENTING

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, ...

Just when you thought parents could not possibly become more hands-off, a new product like the GameDr ($29.99) comes along. The device is designed to limit the amount of time a child spends playing video games by forcing the console to shut down, reports DVICE. As a timer counts down, the gamer is warned when ten minutes and then one minute of playing time remain. When the time is up, the ...

There might have been more than a kernel of truth to your grandparents' old warnings: "That TV is going to rot your brain." According to LiveScience, new research lead by Dimitri Christakis, a professor of pediatrics at the University of Washington School of Medicine, suggests that television can in fact hinder the linguistic development of young children. Having selected 329 children between the ...

In addition to death and taxes, life seems to hold at least one other certainty: The older generation will fret over the younger one's preferred means of entertainment. Over the centuries, parents have freaked out over scandalous stories, books, radio programming, TV, the Internet, and goodness knows what else. In keeping with that grand old tradition, the New York Times reported yesterday that ...

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 ...

According to a study released by The Allstate Foundation and National Organizations for Youth Safety, teenage girls are much more likely to engage in texting and driving than their male counterparts. The organizations surveyed 605 drivers between the ages of 16 and 20. Here's a quick bullet list of some of the study's more interesting findings: 87-percent of teens think that driving and ...

Kids spend a lot of time attached to some form of technology -- be it an iPod, a cell phone, or just vegging out on MySpace. But summer is here, which means some kids will be shipped off to camp and forced to unplug. It's not surprising that this has tweens and teens (and parents) panicking. Kids are used to being in constant contact with their peers via text messages and Facebook, and parents ...

Breastfeeding mothers who seek to share photos of their suckling babies have been embroiled in a war with Facebook since way back in 2007, when the site began removing photos of nursing mothers. Much to the anger of these "lactivists," the social networking site deemed the photos to be "obscene content," hence their removal. Michael Arrington, TechCrunch's rumorist extraordinaire, recently took a ...

Providing further proof that the Internet is not, in fact, "good for nothing," Marc Stephens, a 28-year-old naval engineer from Cornwall, England, watched a quick how-to baby video on YouTube, and successfully delivered his baby daughter, Gabriele. According to the Daily Mirror, this all happened on March 21st, but apparently the Stephens only spilled the details about how the baby actually was ...

Bill Gates Sr., father of the Microsoft mogul and soon-to-be author, previewed his new autobiographical book in a recent interview with The Wall Street Journal. In the interview, the Gates family patriarch discusses seminal moments in his own life, while providing a rare glimpse into the formative years of his son, the world's wealthiest man. Gates Sr., a World War II veteran and former Seattle ...

In the ever-expanding iPhone app store, there are some helpful, fun and downright awesome sources of information and entertainment. That said, every so often an app shows up that makes us wonder what the hell the people at Apple were thinking (if they were, in fact, thinking when they approved it). We are speaking, of course, about the now infamous 'Baby Shaker' app that went on sale Monday, ...

Douglas Gentile, an Iowa State University psychology professor and one of the nation's most highly regarded researchers of media and its effects on children, has spearheaded numerous studies on video games and how they influence child behavior. His most recent study, which observed the gaming tendencies of 1,178 adolescents, contends that 8.5-percent of American youths demonstrate addictive gaming ...

There are plenty of controversial things on YouTube, not least of which are videos showing fights between minors. We've covered this trend before, and responders to our straw-poll voted overwhelmingly that the videos should be removed from the site. Apparently, there are parents out there who would disagree and some, such as 37-year-old Dawn Morris, who would actually encourage the fighting. ...

As is the case with so many parents, one woman in the Tampa Bay area recently thought it would be a great idea to give her son a new Sony PSP as a late Christmas gift. She had no way of knowing how wrong she would wind up being. Six-year-old Eliso Tovar had just turned on his new, prized possession when a picture of a naked woman appeared on the screen, My Fox Tampa Bay reported Sunday. Eliso, ...

Even though GPS software can be used for numerous noble pursuits, including tracking lost pets and helping monitor Alzheimers patients, the technolog is still criticized for being an invasion of privacy. Jonathan Fischer, a 20-year-old college student from Lunenburg, Massachusetts, has designed a GPS gadget, called the Speed Demon, which will be difficult for anyone to condemn, with the ...