While tech has become integrated in the lives of parents and teens, there are positives and negatives that come with it. One problem? When our handheld devices affect our sleep – and this is a particular issue for teens.
We’re living in a strange and uncertain time. Already, as parents, we’re feeling our way to the right set of rules and guidelines for screens and social media. But now that we’re facing an extended time of quarantine and social distancing, the rules are bending and changing every day.
Originally published on CBC Parents.
Editor's note: There is so much conflicting information about screen time, and a lot of it serves to make us feel guilty, worried or both. We asked the Director of Education at Media Smarts (Canada's Centre for Digital and Media Literacy), Matthew Johnson, to give us the straight goods on the latest info. What is the big deal with screen time? Here's his response.
Today, Facebook and MediaSmarts would like to announce a new guide for teens, Think Before You Share, that provides tips about sharing and making decisions online.
Recently our youngest, who is 14, decided she wanted to watch Keeping Up with The Kardashians.
Was “digital detox” or “reduce screen time” on your New Year’s resolution list, but it’s not really happening? Maybe you’ve been glued to recent world events or news happening right in Canada and feel like you can’t put the phone down? You aren’t alone.
The holiday season is meant to be a time of joy, comfort, and togetherness. However, we also know it brings about stress too. It can be far too easy to get swept up in shopping and buying, and so the season can leave us feeling far too Grinch-like (before his heart grew in size, of course).
How big a problem is cyberbullying? To judge by media coverage, which frequently focuses on the most sensational and extreme cases, it’s an epidemic, and schools and legislators have often responded with heavy-handed measures. Students, on the other hand, are more likely to say that cyberbullying is less of an issue than adults perceive it to be – though even they, in many cases, overestimate how common it actually is. MediaSmarts’ report Cyberbullying: Dealing with Online Meanness, Cruelty and Threats, the third in a series of reports based on data from our Young Canadians in a Wired World survey, suggests that so far as Canadian youth are concerned the answer is somewhere in between, presenting a portrait of online conflict that demands more nuanced, contextualized and evidence-based responses.
If you are a parent and you’ve been thinking of starting a blog, writing for parenting magazines, or becoming a social media influencer in the parent sphere, keep reading.
Since at least the days of Birth of a Nation (1915), Hollywood has turned to history for material. A quick survey of this year's Academy Award nominations shows that this is as true now as ever, with five out of the nine nominees for Best Picture – Argo, Django Unchained, Les Miserables, Zero Dark Thirty and odds-on favourite Lincoln – based in history in some way. Their approaches vary, of course, with the history-as-backdrop approach of Les Miserables, the revenge fantasy of Django Unchained, the academic character study of Lincoln, the docudrama of Zero Dark Thirty and the history-as-thriller of Argo.