Screenagers Blog

On a recent 3-day trip to Vancouver, BC, with my family, I compiled a list of podcasts that I wanted my kids to listen to and asked for their input as well. On a recent 3-day trip to Vancouver, BC, with my family, I compiled a list of podcasts that I wanted my kids to listen to and asked for their input as well. In today’s blog I give you several podcast episode recommendations from me and my family.

Plain and simple, there is one thing I recommend doing during the holidays for love and laughter. Bring out old photo albums and put them in a high-trafficked spot in your home — be it the kitchen table or a table in a living room. I predict we won’t have photo albums in the future, but we do right now.

Is learning to write obsolete? How impactful will all the bias be? How can we trust who wrote what, including the issue of cheating? Today I’m writing about ChatGPT. This is HUGE. From the program itself, “ChatGPT is a large language model trained by OpenAI. It is designed to generate human-like responses to text input.”

We all know tech gifts are a big part of the holiday season, but as always, I offer tech-free ideas today. I am not putting down tech — many wonderful tech gifts will get exchanged this year, but I hope you will find this tech-free list to be a bit helpful.

One of the most important resiliency tools we all carry in our tool belts is the act of remembering past times we got through challenges. The problem is doing it during setbacks, and those times don’t readily come to mind. Today’s blog is about 3 ways to nurture this skill in our children.

This Thanksgiving week, I’m taking time with my family. Due to illnesses in the family, this is the first time since the pandemic began that we finally get to have an extended family gathering, and I’m taking the week to truly enjoy it. Here are four of my past Screenagers’ Tech Talk Tuesday favorite Thanksgiving posts which are chock-full of ideas for fostering togetherness this week.

Hearing ideas from people in our circles can significantly impact us in many ways. For example, it might get us to try something new, and being able to follow up with the person who shared the idea can get us through challenging times. Parents often believe other parents are much more permissive around tech than they actually are. In today’s blog, I write about ways you can help instigate more sharing of screen-time parenting approaches with your friends.

A parent recently told me how upset she was because her teen’s sports team posted something inappropriate in their social media group. Today I share my advice to the mom about ways to handle such a situation.

Recently I received a wonderful email from Adam Slusher, vice principal at Pennsville Middle School in New Jersey, who did a thoughtful rollout of Away For The Day, using many of the free resources we’ve put together to help people through the process. What I think is great about the letter is that it maps out in great detail the rules they created as well as details on how they implemented Away For The Day.

Many young people and adults love horror films and talk about how they love the feeling of being scared. This is so very different from me. I am not at all a fan. This week I have been thinking about ways to talk with kids about when horror in movies, TV shows, and online, in general, go too far.

I firmly believe that kids should have at least two activities that they are doing outside of school time. But what to do if the teen is not motivated to find something to do? In today’s blog, I write about what to do when our teens are resistant to getting involved in extracurriculars.

The Screenagers’ Tech Talk Tuesday blog from two weeks ago provided four questions for teens to answer regarding the HBO show Euphoria. As intended, the questions sparked conversations among adults and teens, and we got many thoughtful answers from teens in the questionnaire.