Tag: PARENTS

While some outlets may bash Chicago's St. John Cantius Roman Catholic church for warning its parishioners of Facebook's moral dangers, we won't. After all, the church's clergy didn't forbid Facebook; they just declared that it facilitates vanity and dishonesty (specifically in children), allowing them to concoct their own identities and social realities with less risk of real-world consequence. ...

Obviously, we'd all like to imagine that our parents joined Facebook just to make our lives miserable. But, according to Pew Internet, the olds got wise to social networks for "political purposes" during the last election cycle. The research organization found a massive jump in politically oriented Internet use from the 2006 election, and discovered that more than one in five online adults ...

Lying about your age is a time-honored Internet tradition, which is why it should come as no real surprise that plenty of preteens are on Facebook nowadays. Facebook officially forbids children under the age of 13 from using the site but, according to a study from the Pew Internet and American Life Project, there are plenty that do. About 46-percent of all American 12-year-olds use social ...

Parents everywhere can now hack into their kids' Facebook accounts without feeling even an ounce of guilt -- because a cop in New Jersey says it's okay. Mahwah Police Chief James Batelli recently told NBC New York that all parents should use keystroke-logging spyware to keep tabs on every site their children visit, and every status or photo they post to Facebook. "When it comes down to safety ...

What do you get when you give an iPad to an 8-year-old girl? A bunch of Smurfberries, and a $1,400 bill from iTunes. That's what Stephanie Kay received, after her daughter Madison spent her winter break playing the 'Smurfs' Village' game on her family's iPad. The second-grader from Maryland apparently wasn't aware that the Smurfberries she collected cost real money -- a detail that, according ...

Share There's a good chance that young children growing up in today's world will learn how to use an iPad before learning how to tie their shoes. That's the takeaway from a new study by online security firm AVG, which found that 58-percent of kids between the ages of 2 and 5 know how to play a "basic computer game," while a full 63-percent know how to turn a computer off and on. Most young ...

Police in Uniontown, Pennsylvania were shocked to find a home stinking of feces and six children sleeping on bare mattresses. The childrens' mother, who had left the pantry bare and food rotting in the refrigerator, was neither absent nor an alcoholic; she was a gaming addict. After the children, three of whom are toddlers, were removed from the residence Monday, their stepfather told WPXI that ...

Video games may detract from your child's physical activity and social life, but can they also drive your kid mental? According to a controversial new study, they can. Recently published in Pediatrics Journal, said study examined 3,000 children in Singapore over the course of two years. Researchers found that about one out of every ten children ultimately became addicted to video games, and ...

Share A woman in Colorado has been arrested after telling police that she was busy on Facebook while her one-year-old son was drowning in a bathtub. The mother, 34-year-old Shannon Johnson, reportedly told authorities that she was playing a Facebook game called 'Cafe World,' browsing through her news feed, and sharing videos around the time that her son was in the tub one day last September. ...

Parents face a particularly worrisome and contentious dilemma when deciding whether or not to afford their children with social networking privileges. Kids not only become susceptible to obvious outside dangers -- such as predators and bullies -- but they also become susceptible to their own youthful indiscretions, like posting damaging party pics or joining inappropriate groups. Families must ...

Chris Hansen thrust chat rooms, and their inherent dangers, into the national consciousness with his legendary 'To Catch a Predator' sting operations on 'Dateline.' Despite Hansen's admirable and alarmingly successful crackdowns, chatting online definitely remains a perilous endeavor, particularly for kids. To combat the dangers, both parents and children need to familiarize themselves with ...

In studying cell phones' effects on human health, University of California Los Angeles researchers have concluded that pregnant mothers who use cell phones are more likely to have children with behavioral problems. Although lead researcher and epidemiologist Dr. Leeka Kheifets is reticent to say that cell phone exposure causes such problems, she did tell Reuters: "It is hard to understand how such ...

Today's teenage bullies may conduct the majority of their schoolyard terrorism on Facebook, but parents are quickly catching on, and doing their best to mitigate cyberbullying. The New York Times Magazine recently investigated what some parents are doing to counteract online bullying, and, not surprisingly, found a pretty wide variety of approaches. Some run to the police, while others choose to ...

A few months ago, 30-year-old Alisha Arnold found out that she was pregnant for the third time, after having suffered two miscarriages in less than two years. She and her husband Pete, however, weren't sure if they were ready to become parents, and began entertaining thoughts of an abortion. Before making that intensely personal decision, though, the couple decided to gauge the collective opinion ...

Last month, a group of researchers in the U.K. discovered that school-age kids who spend more than two hours a day in front of a computer or television screen tend to display more serious behavioral problems than their less tech-addled counterparts. And, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics, the two-hour threshold even applies to preschoolers, as well. But how many tots actually adhere ...