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Media Safety Tips: Early childhood (birth to 5 years old)
Media risksThe risks that kids encounter in media fall into four categories:
Watching Watchmen
The most anticipated movie of the year, at least in some circles, is opening on March 6th: Watchmen, the adaptation of the 1986 comic book of the same name. The original, which won a Hugo Award for science fiction and was named one of Time's top 100 novels of the twentieth century, tells the story of a group of retired superheroes investigating the death of one of their colleagues; the mystery leads the reader through the alternate world their existence has created, in which heroes with cosmic superpowers overawed the Soviet Union and in which Richard Nixon is still president in 1985. Though time will tell how successful the film will turn out to be, the buzz around its launch gives an opportunity to look at comics and how they're adapted into other media.Helping kids cope with media coverage of war and traumatic events
The intense media coverage that accompanies traumatic events, such as war, acts of terrorism and natural disasters, can be very disturbing. Certain young people are particularly vulnerable and some can be seriously distressed simply by watching replays of such events. Parents, educators, health practitioners and others who work with kids can help to lessen anxieties arising from the coverage of catastrophic events.Managing Music in the Home
A tip sheet for parents on how to manage music in the home.
Surviving Screen-free Week
Once upon a time Screen-Free Week used to be known as TV Turnoff and Digital Detox Week. Participating in TV Turnoff was a bit easier when my daughters were younger because laptops, tablets and iPhones weren’t nearly as pervasive as they are today.Sexuality and Romantic Relationships in the Digital Age
There’s a long-standing relationship between sex and the Internet. As far as back the 1980s, Usenet and local bulletin board systems were used to share pornographic text files and crude (in both senses) graphics, and people have been using digital media to form and carry out online relationships at least as long. However, just as estimates of how much online traffic and content is made up of sexual material tend to be exaggerated[1], our new report – Sexuality and Romantic Relationships in the Digital Age – from MediaSmarts’ Young Canadians in a Wired World survey of 5,436 students, shows that for Canadian youth, sexuality and romantic relationships play a fairly small part of their online lives.Sharing Social Media as a Family
I think every kid should know how to swim. It’s one of those crucial life skills that must be in everyone’s arsenal. That’s why my husband and I introduced our kids to water at the earliest possible opportunity. First in the bath and the shower (okay, so maybe these are more about hygiene), and then we graduated to sprinklers and inflatable pools, wading pools, beaches, and lakes. As soon as the kids were old enough we signed them up for swimming lessons.Online peer intervention
One of the biggest changes in our understanding of bullying over the past few years has been our increased awareness of the important role that witnesses, or bystanders, play in any bullying situation. Research on offline bullying has shown that witnesses can be just as important as targets or perpetrators in determining how a bullying scenario plays out. This is especially relevant in the case of electronic bullying, where witnesses have many more choices in how they might engage: they can choose to be invisible, to join in anonymously, to re-victimize someone by forwarding bullying material – or they can choose to intervene, to offer support to the person being targeted and to bear witness to what they have seen