What is “Metric Parenting”?

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Fast Company | Reva Seth

Here’s How “Metric Parenting” Can Help Relieve Working-Parent Guilt

We track our fitness goals, nutritional intake, and spending, but few of us track our parenting activities in quite the same way.

“I am not going to be a good minister unless I’m happy at home and my family’s happy and there’s some balance,” she said.

WHAT “METRIC PARENTERS” DO DIFFERENTLY

There are several important lessons about work-life balance in McKenna’s decision, but one of them involves what I’ve called “metric parenting”—a way of using the same tactics to meet goals and deadlines at work in order to get more of what you want in your family life. Doing that well can help alleviate some of the guilt that can come with being a busy working parent.

While interviewing more than 500 parents for my second book (full disclosure: Catherine McKenna was one of those parents), I noticed many were doing something peculiar: Without always realizing it, the working parents I spoke to were deliberately setting goals like “being more present” or “cultivating my child’s curiosity” and turning them into tangible objectives they could work toward achieving. They regularly scheduled time to review their progress, and many of the parents with two or more children even had some way or another of tracking their engagement with each child.

What’s more, I found that over the five years I followed my interview group, the subset of “metric parenters” (as I’d come to think of them) seemed to report feeling happier with the ways they were balancing their families with their work. Interestingly, almost all were doing this unconsciously: They were simply taking what they knew to work in their professional lives and applying it in their personal lives.

It may sound like overkill, but if you’re already a successful professional, why not take the skills you’ve developed at work and put them to good use at home, too? Here’s are a few tips to help you apply the principles of metric parenting in your own life.

1. DEFINE YOUR GOALS

Just as you’d define what success looks like on the business, financial, or professional fronts, articulate what “being a good parent” means or looks like to you—at this point in your life and in your child’s, knowing that might shift over time.

Even easier, start with your parenting pain points: Maybe you feel like you’re on your phone too much during family time, or you wish you were more available for class trips. Whatever it is, get clear on what you’d like to change, or what you’d like to have more of.

Then actually write these goals down. If it isn’t documented somewhere, you’re less likely to follow through. And if you have more than one child, it can be helpful to segment out your targets by each child.

2. BREAK IT DOWN INTO ACTIONS

According to recent Pew research, many working parents feel they aren’t doing well enough when it comes to their families.

Metric parenting can be a good antidote. Once you’ve established your parenting goals, brainstorm three to four tactics or actions you could take toward each one. What would make you feel like you’re accomplishing those goals? Then schedule them in. McKenna, for instance, is scheduling four evenings at home with no online access for two hours.

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by MindMake via MindMake Blog

Should You Monitor Your Teen’s Internet Use?

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VeryWell | Amy Morin, LCSW

Texting, social media use, and blogging are issues that no other generation has dealt with before. For parents of teens, establishing healthy rules and setting limits on internet use is unchartered territory. It’s important for parents to be well-educated about the potential risks teens face when their on the internet so they can make an informed decision about how closely to monitor a teen’s smartphone, social media, or internet browsing.

Potential Safety Issues

There are a lot of debates over how much parents should monitor their teens’ online activity. After all, many dangers lurk on the internet- cyberbullies, online predators, and thieves can take a serious toll on the well-being of young people.

Unfortunately, many teens also risk ruining their reputations on the internet. Sending scantily clad or nude photos, posting inappropriate comments or being associated with scandalous content on social media can be harmful. Colleges, future employers, or even law enforcement could obtain material that teens leak into cyberspace.

At other times, teens fall prey to “catfish,” who use false identities to lure others in. An adult from a foreign country may pretend to be a teen from a nearby school, or a teen bully may try to befriend a potential victim online by assuming an undercover identity. Sometimes catfish simply want to steal information, while at other times they ask for financial help.

Teens can often become easy targets to these types of schemes.

Varying Degrees of Online Monitoring

Some parents take a hands-off approach to a teen’s online activity. After all, many parents know less than their teens do about the internet and social media. And other parents aren’t sure how to monitor a teen’s internet activity.

The danger of being uninvolved is that teens can get themselves into big trouble. A teen who is being cyberbullied may not know how to broach the subject with a parent. A teen whose activity is never monitored may be willing to arrange dates with strangers or may give out private information online without thinking about the potential consequences.

On the other end of the spectrum are parents who want to monitor everything from the contents of emails to who their teen is friending on Facebook. There are apps and software programs that allow parents complete access to everything their teen does online.

The danger of being overly involved in your teen’s online activity is that your teen may not feel trusted. It could damage your relationship. It may also lead to your teen going behind your back and opening social media accounts that you don’t even know exist.

Teens need some freedom to talk to friends without parents present. Without some privacy and independence, teens will struggle to create their own identities.

Trying to maintain too much control can also lead to rebellion.

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by MindMake via MindMake Blog

Homework and Screen Time, What’s The Plan This Year?

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ScreenAgers | Delaney Ruston

Screen time and homework can be a real problem. Our children often need screens to do their homework and then are automatically vulnerable to distraction when they need concentration the most. Famous research out of Stanford showed that when people multitask they feel as if they are doing better and better at the different tasks but actually they are doing worse and worse on all of them.

I am starting to have talks now with my kids about how are they going to manage homework—both being organized around it and staying focused. Staying focused is so important because their brains are developing these critical functions during these teen years. When I interviewed Dimitri Christakis, MD at Seattle Children’s Hospital, for Screenagers, he said that successfully building executive function skills are measured not just by staying on tasks we find interesting, but by actually learning how to stay on tasks that we find challenging or tedious.

For this week’s Tech Talk Tuesday I have some conversation starters about how we can work with our kids to find ways to help them get organized and manage homework.

* How often do you think you need a break when you are working on homework? Every 20 minutes, 30 minutes?

* How much of your homework has to be done on a computer? Parents can answer the same question for their own work.

* Where would you like your kids to be while doing their homework and where would they like to be?

* During homework, what do you use your phone for? Calculator? Collaborating with friends? Checking assignments online?

* Are there advantages of having a day planner that is not an app, or online?  (OK, I am biased here, in my family I think having a paper planner is good to prevent Tessa from  saying that she needs her phone to check her assignments. This year she is going to have a notebook planner) Parents should share how they keep track of their work.

Read the original article at Screenagers

by MindMake via MindMake Blog

My Kids Did Absolutely Nothing This Summer And It Was Fabulous

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Scary Mommy | Angelica Shiels

I still remember that July afternoon in the early ’80s. I was dressed in the summer uniform of my four-year-old self — my pink sequined tutu from Rummage-o-Rama. I ran in circles around the cracked plastic pool in the middle of the yard and leaped over the hose hanging out the side.

My toddler sister sat naked in the middle of the murky water, happily splashing bacteria into her open smile while floating blades of grass clung to her chin. My parents’ bodies indented their vinyl folding chairs — my mom slathered with baby oil while lacquering her toes fuchsia, and dad’s mustache occasionally bobbing out below his paperback.

That afternoon, my dad had handed me a 17 cent cylinder of iodized salt and told me that if I managed to sprinkle some of it on a sparrow’s tail, the bird would be temporarily flightless and I would be able I keep it as a pet. I still remember my delight and anticipation as I galloped around the hunk of plastic in the yard, bounding toward birds with my grubby fingers eagerly clasped around the salt container.

I never caught a bird that day, but on that day and throughout many messy and uninhibited occasions in my own childhood, I did catch a perspective.

Life is only a series of moments. The moment doesn’t care if it takes place in a weed-filled yard outside of a shabby duplex if it is filled with joy and presence and wonder. Neither does the moment care if it takes place at Disney World if it is hungry and standing preoccupied in a sweaty line.

Now, I realize sending children to summer camp or daycare is a necessity for some families. However, where I live and with my particular work schedule, paying for a babysitter to come to the house while I work in the summer happens to be much cheaper than paying for three kids to go to a camp or daycare. So, considering this reality and keeping in mind my own precious unstructured childhood, my husband and I opted to “send” our kids to “Camp Free-for-All” at home this summer — run partially by Camp Counselor Mommy and partially by Easygoing Babysitter Stacey.

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by MindMake via MindMake Blog

5 Things That Meditation Taught Me About Parenting

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Headspace | Chris Lentz

Parenting may be the hardest job in the world. You can’t really prepare for it until you’re in it, so it’s a role fraught with opportunities for self-doubt. Of course, there are also great rewards that come along with the hard work. But no matter what, it is continuous on-the-job training, and it can wear out even the most prepared parents.

When it comes to my own children, I’ve found that meditation has helped me balance those emotional swings and enabled me to enjoy the ride even more.

Here are five lessons meditation taught me about parenting:

1. Small habits lead to big change

When it comes to meditation, the key is to make a habit of the exercise and trust in the incremental progress. The first time we meditate, we may not see immediate benefits. Yet given enough time, we look back one day and notice that we approach situations differently or feel differently than we did before.

With children, the same applies. Inevitably, there will be behaviors to correct or new behaviors you want to cement. Perhaps you want your child to share more, clean more, control her temper, or take responsibility for her action. Or maybe you want him to be kind to others. It starts with developing the right habits.

For example, after a meal you can tell your child to scrub his plate and utensils and wipe the table. It’s a small habit, one that’s easy to establish and teaches a child to clean up after himself. Over time, you can build on this to make sure he cleans other parts of his life. Perhaps eventually you’ll be able to stop telling him to straighten up that bedroom! (We can dream.)

Regardless of your goal, I believe it’s important to stay focused on establishing the habit and trusting the process. With meditation, change occurs slowly in our minds, and we only notice those changes after they have occurred. We see a road behind us rather than a single event.

For me, the same idea applies to raising my children into the adults they will become.

2. Deflect rather than combat

In meditation, we think about allowing thoughts to come and go. Rather than try to change thoughts, we acknowledge them and let them pass by.

This has been a valuable lesson for me. Children become masters at getting under ourskin. When they don’t get their way, they throw tantrums at a young age and ask “why?” in every way imaginable until you simply say the phrase you swore you never would: “because I said so.”

It’s very easy to fall into the trap and engage with them at their level. In doing so, we get frustrated and often do not achieve any meaningful resolution.

Instead, I have tried to recognize my own frustrations, see them for what they are, and let them pass. I focus on helping my children with a clear mind—both in the moment and by setting the right example.

3. Go easy on yourself

There is no right or wrong in meditation. Some days are better than others. We are not necessarily trying to change anything but see things for what they are. And in doing so, and in trusting that process, we grow. This is one of the toughest lessons I’ve encountered as a parent. Each day presents a new challenge, and just when you think you have the hang it, your child goes and gets a year older. And the process starts anew. The truth is, we’re always learning to parent.

My aunt once told me, “As long as you treat your children like your everyday dishes and not your fine china, everything will be ok.”

The words ring true for me every day. Parenting is hard work. It’s important that we recognize that, accept it, and forgive ourselves. Some days are better than others, and that’s OK.

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by MindMake via MindMake Blog

Parenting Tools to Get Your Kids to Listen

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Lifehack | Heather Didomenico

What does it really mean when our kids are listening? It means they are cooperating and being responsible—two very important habits to help our kids master for future success. Parenting that kids can understand teaches habits they will carry for a lifetime, and it will help you and the entire family get along (including you and your spouse!)

I recently wrote an article on what makes kids brains grow biggerwhich shows that when parents express love to their children through effective and nurturing communication, they become happier and more well-adjusted. Positive parenting without bargaining, yelling, or intimidation will help you develop nurturing communication. Keep reading to learn 8, easy parenting hacks that will teach valuable life lessons.

1. Be a great teacher.

A great teacher takes a hand, opens a mind, and touches a heart. We must be truly honest with ourselves that our role as parents is being the most important teacher your child will ever have. As parents, we are the guardrails in our childrens’ lives, perfectly positioned to keep the car on track. Surely the car will veer off plenty of times on its journey.

Accepting that our children will make mistakes rather than expecting them to be perfect is half the battle in embracing your honorary role as teacher of the year. Learning to tolerate imperfection does not mean sacrificing values; it just means to apply a bit of patience and understanding while your child comes into her own. Compassionate parenting builds and maintains healthy parent-child bonds and supports that all important brain growth that can change the world.

2. Create house rules.

Enlist your entire family in creating a list of house rules that are easy to understand. Mutually agreed upon expectations gives your family the basis of understanding it needs to create respect between one another. It also makes parenting a heck of a lot easier when everyone is on the same page. A family meeting where rules are brainstormed and agreed upon allows everyone to practice important communication and teamwork skills like speaking in turn, listening, and contributing.

Be sure to select rules which the whole family, including adults, will follow. The single most important aspect in creating respect is that we as adults(parents) should model the behavior that is being asked of our children. Lastly, rules should be limited to 4 or 5 and be phrased in a way that states how you want the behavior to look. For instance; “We will speak kindly to those we love” rather than “Don’t talk back.”

3. Establish clear consequences.

Successful parenting requires a few steps so that the behavior and/or lesson you are trying to teach actually sticks. Consistency with consequences is a way for parents to allow kids to practice the desired behavior. If they don’t get it right the first time, try and try again! Consequences need to fit the offense, so while sitting down to create the house rules it is helpful to get together with your spouse to determine agreed upon consequences for when the rule is broken.

If you want, the kids can even weigh in; they usually pick consequences that are more punitive than necessary so it is interesting to get their perspective. This approach establishes communication and cooperation between parents. It also irons out disagreements that often happen when Mom and Dad bicker over how to handle the infraction as it’s happening, which takes the focus off of the negative behavior. Kids love this as they quietly slip away unnoticed while mom and dad attempt to hash it out.

4. Count to three.

One of my favorite parenting gurus is Thomas W. Phelen; he wrote 1-2-3 Magic and it was one of the first and most effective parenting approaches my husband and I used as new parents. Among many other concepts, Phelen introduced the importance of giving children a measured warning system when their behavior is annoying, obnoxious, or unacceptable. Children are not little adults, and they are not born knowing how to act. In fact, it is our job as parents to teach them what we expect from them.

As mentioned before, when this is done in a way that is nurturing and supportive, the parenting process supports brain growth in the way of problem solving and emotional regulation. Once you notice a behavior from your child that is annoying, obnoxious, and/or unacceptable, you simply state (without yelling) what it is that you would like your child to do instead. If he/she does not comply with your request in a few seconds, you begin to count, using a firm tone of voice, eye contact, a visual prompt (holding your fingers up to coordinate with the number), and pausing in between numbers to monitor response. What happens at 3? A consequence for not favorably complying to your request.

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by MindMake via MindMake Blog

Summing Up Parenting in One Sentence, According to Jim Gaffigan

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Parents Magazine | Melissa Willets

Did we mention he’s a dad of five?

This past weekend, my husband and I hunkered down on the sofa with snacks and binge-watched Jim Gaffigan stand-up comedy shows on Netflix. You’re right; it was awesome. He’s hil-arious! And I thought so even before I learned Gaffigan is a dad of five!

Yes, you read that right. The comedian and his wife Jeannie have five children: Patrick, 3; Michael, 5; Katie, 7; Jack, 10; and Marre, 12.

But lest you think the funnyman has fatherhood down to a science given all that practice, Gaffigan told People magazine that, actually, “Parenting is all about making mistakes and dealing with a certain level of guilt.”

Can’t say I disagree with you, Jim. I feel guilty right now because my kids are eating lollipops before breakfast. Oops. At least I’m not alone in feeling fairly inadequate as a parent sometimes. (Okay, a lot of the time.)

15 Hilarious Truths About Parenting, According to Comedian Jim Gaffigan

Gaffigan, who has talked about living in a two-bedroom New York City apartment with his brood, may have made his fair share of mistakes, but he also has an important gem of wisdom to offer newer fathers: “When the baby comes, there’s gonna come a moment where your wife or girlfriend’s gonna be like, ‘I’m starving.'” So, make sure you have food, dads! Gaffigan adds, “After a woman gives birth, there’s a hunger I always found fascinating.”

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by MindMake via MindMake Blog

Teen Makes ‘Sit With Us’ App That Helps Students Find Lunch Buddies

The Importance Of Mindful Parenting

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The Huffington Post | Michelle Vale

As a mom and wife who works full-time, it sometimes feels like I am forever serving others. On days when this feeling overtakes me, I too engage in a little “lazy parenting,” where my kids spend significantly more time on their iPads or in front of the television than I would normally deem appropriate. I am sure all parents have days like these! However, I’d like to address how lazy parenting can stretch far beyond these occasional moments of exhaustion in a way that negatively impedes on others. I am not speaking of the kind mentioned above, where the so called parent lazes around while the kids happily play on their devices. What I am hoping to call out is those parents that are not making a conscious effort to take the time to parent their children.

The definition of mother is to give birth to (a child) : to be or act as a mother to (someone) : to care for or protect (someone) like a mother. The definition of father is more vague, defined as a male parent. In the 21st century these roles, for many families, have become one in the same, with fathers having become much more involved in child-rearing. The family unit has evolved and in some cases there are now two moms or two dads. And yet in some families a parent rears solo. Whatever the scenario, the basic idea is to care for them. And the hope is that we achieve this by teaching them to be kind and helpful and instill morals and values in them. By doing this we help guide them on how to be mindful individuals and prepare them to serve as positive contributors in society.

This is what you would imagine people have in mind when they decide to take the journey into parenthood. However, many parents often fall short and become far too distracted with their own needs and desires. This results in children receiving little guidance on how to behave and be respectful of others.

I often witness kids getting away with being unkind and disrespectful, as their parents stand nearby. This covers everything from how a child treats an adult or another child in a given situation or how a child’s behavior in a public place impacts others. It falls on us, the parents, to seize the moment and address the given behavior when it happens. Sadly, it’s not so unusual to see just the opposite. I notice children in restaurants running around or speaking loudly when complete strangers are within ear shot. Where are the parents and why are they completely disengaged you ask? They are consumed in their own pleasures of eating, texting, or conversing with other adults while their kid’s behavior encroaches on others enjoyment. Another scenario — a child mistreats or upsets another child and the parent present completely dismisses the situation because they don’t feel like dealing with it. Yet another example would be in times where a child is being wasteful or being disrespectful to the environment they are in.

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by MindMake via MindMake Blog

What Kids Should Know by the Time They’re Done With School

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The Atlantic | Hayley Glatter, Emily Deruy, and Alia Wong

Education experts weigh in on the content areas children should have mastery over by the time they graduate.

We asked prominent voices in education—from policy makers and teachers to activists and parents—to look beyond laws, politics, and funding and imagine a utopian system of learning. They went back to the drawing board—and the chalkboard—to build an educational Garden of Eden. We’re publishing their answers to one question each day this week. Responses have been lightly edited for clarity and length.

Today’s assignment: The content. What should students be expected to know by the time they leave school?

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Rita Pin Ahrens, the director of education policy for the Southeast Asia Resource Action Center

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Students will leave school with the ability to think critically and independently, to leverage and adapt to ever-shifting technology and modes of communication, to navigate and direct their own independent research, and to understand how to collaborate with others. There also will be a stronger focus on both career preparation and college readiness. That means integrating the soft skills that current employers find valuable, as well as technology readiness. All of this will be taught in the context of the subjects we associate with school—art, history, science, and math—but we have to think more creatively about how we present concepts, content, and opportunities to really expand students’ ways of thinking. Math doesn’t always have to be taught in a 40- to 50-minute dedicated chunk of time. It can be—if that’s appropriate for the age and learning objectives, especially for advanced math and science—but we need to reorganize and disrupt how we are currently teaching students.

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Nicholson Baker, the author of Substitute: Going to School With a Thousand Kids

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Debating the design of core curricula is a way for grownups to entertain themselves, but it doesn’t help children get anywhere worth going. We should demand that all reformers and armchair rigorists do some actual public-school teaching—maybe three weeks as a substitute every year—as a precondition to furthering their proposed changes.

Most learning, beginning with speech—which is the real miracle—happens outside of school.

But reading in school is crucial, obviously. More silent reading and reading to friends—reading of anything—is a good idea. Kids know how to talk—they’re remarkably enterprising talkers, in fact—but many stumble over the decoding of simple sentences, even in high school. Some days, if they hate eye-reading, let them listen to audiobooks and podcasts—whatever holds their interest, and delights them, and makes them laugh. Have them write in one- or two-paragraph bursts after they’ve done some reading. Don’t require outlines. Toss the standard essay form out the window. Avoid horrible two-week-long projects.

Hire teachers who are good explainers, who are curious about the world’s infinite subject matter. Pay them more and give them their heads. Let them lead their classes in surprising directions.

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Carol Burris, the executive director of the Network for Public Education

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Anyone who claims they know what students will need to know and be able to do 20 years from now is engaging in speculation. Technology is moving at an astounding rate, and the job market of the next generation is impossible to predict. We do students a disservice when we follow fads—students will learn technological skills on their own. What remains invaluable is a sound academic education that develops well-rounded, informed citizens of the nation and the world.
Our society needs adults who are competent, critical readers who can write with clarity and purpose. Fluency in math is important not only for the development of computational skills, but also because of the abstract reasoning it develops. As important as literacy and numeracy are, students deserve so much more. They need knowledge of historical events along with the ability to analyze those events from differing points of view. Students deserve to communicate in a second language. A physical or biological science along with hands-on laboratory experiences will be a part of school curriculum every year. And all students will participate in the arts at least through their elementary- and middle-school years.

I am a great fan of the International Baccalaureate program, which integrates all of the above and more. Its curriculum and assessments should be a model for all schools.

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by MindMake via MindMake Blog

Children Won’t Be Saved By A Digital Detox

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The Guardian | Eva Wiseman

he idea of a “digital detox” makes my eyes roll so far back I see memories from a past life as concubine number 6. When will we come to terms with our own desires and, rather than banning something we fear altogether, try to understand it? Whether booze or sugar or Celebrity Big Brother, there is a more adult way of dealing with something we feel has a hold over us than writing it off completely.

You see the fear most clearly in the eyes of a parent scrolling through their child’s Instagram. The Blair Witch Project had nothing on this, the sight of 17 comments under Grace’s selfie, all variations on the emoji for “hot”. The typical reaction? Burn it. Burn the phone, burn the internet, run now and run far. Pacing, Googling while chewing nicotine gum, “Do they have Snapchat in Devon?” Backspace, “Seoul?”

Which seems to be the general reaction to a new study confirming a rise in mental health problems among teenagers in the UK. It’s bad; it’s what we knew. The Department of Education spoke to 30,000 14- and 15-year-olds and found things are getting worse for girls. Out of those surveyed, 37% had three or more symptoms of psychological distress (for example, feeling worthless) compared to 15% of boys. More than one in three teen girls suffers from anxiety or depression. This rise of 10% in 10 years has led experts to call it a “slow-growing epidemic”. The news itself is depressing and distressing; the snap response has been to blame social media.

Once, young people ran around in fields, barefoot, laughing at the dying sun. Unhappiness was invented with Myspace in 2003, a belated millennium bug, and ever since adults have been staring suspiciously at screens, waiting for the next explosion. Except the problem is not the screen – like all shiny things, they simply show reflections.

 

In a memorable podcast, Ira Glass talked to a group of girls about their lives online, unpicking the machinations of their Instagram feeds as they watched the comments under their selfies roll in. What he concluded was that the only difference between what these 14-year-olds are doing and what humans everywhere have always done, is that their statuses are transparent, and noisy, and constantly updating. “It’s like I’m a brand,” said 13-year-old Julia, both its director and product. “To stay relevant…” Her friend Jane finishes her sentence “…you have to work hard.”

Responding to the study, Nick Harrop, campaigns manager of YoungMinds charity, said social media “puts pressure on girls to live their lives in the public domain, to present a personal ‘brand’ from a young age, and to seek reassurance in the form of likes and shares.” But that pressure, for a person to be a brand, doesn’t come from social media. It comes from believing that your image is the only thing you can control and that, when careers and security feel like fairytales, individualism is the only way to succeed. These problems don’t disappear when you sign out of Instagram.

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by MindMake via MindMake Blog

Why I’m Not GPS Tracking My Teenager

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Scary Mommy | Melissa Fenton

When my oldest started driving, I immediately did what any caring, modern, and loving mother would do — I installed a GPS tracking app on his phone. Most cellular family plans include tracking apps anyway, so why not?

This was for safety reasons of course, and if I could see where he and his phone were at all times, I could relax knowing he arrived safely at all his destinations. I’m not alone in this thinking, as there are literally dozens of teen driving apps available in the app store. There’s everything from an app that will rat your kid out if they unlock their phone while driving, an app to tell you what speed they’re going and when/if they exceed the speed limit, apps that will read aloud any text you send your teen, and even driving logs that will archive every car trip your teen takes. You can even secretly install a GPS tracking device on their car if one doesn’t exist on it already.

So I eagerly uploaded a variety of safe teen driving and location tracking apps to both of our phones, and I sent him on his happy and heavily monitored way. This raising an independent teenager thing was going to be a piece of cake because he would be living under my constant surveillance. Thank you, software developers, for helping this anxious mom endure her son’s newfound freedom!

Two weeks later, I removed them all.

You see, in theory, these innovative GPS trackers and speed monitors are a great idea. We all want our kids to stay safe and drive safely, and as parents, we want to have the tools we need to ensure that happens. But eventually, those tools and apps start to manage us.

I ended up spending too many hours of my day watching a blinking pushpin slowly make its way across a map, and too many minutes checking, rechecking, refreshing, then checking again to see if my teen was where he said he was, and if the app agreed. In some warped effort to protect him and keep my sanity, I threw trust and faith out the window and metaphorically strapped a house arrest tracker on my own kid’s ankle. And he had done absolutely nothing wrong except to be luckily (or unluckily) born in a time that provides such technologies. We have them, so why not use them, right? Who wouldn’t want that peace of mind? At first, I wanted it, and then I just plain didn’t.

I told myself it was time to embrace my inner free-range parent and put a little (okay, a lot) of trust in my teenager, so I landed the GPS tracking helicopter cold turkey. It was one of the hardest decisions I’ve made as a parent of a teenager, considering practically every other parent I knew was still happily clinging to their phone apps, telling me exactly where their kid was at any given moment.

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by MindMake via MindMake Blog

Like. Flirt. Ghost. A Journey Into The Social Media Lives of Teens

It’s ‘Digital Heroin’: How Screens Turn Kids Into Psychotic Junkies

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New York Post | Dr. Nicholas Kardaras

Susan* bought her 6-year-old son John an iPad when he was in first grade. “I thought, ‘Why not let him get a jump on things?’ ” she told me during a therapy session. John’s school had begun using the devices with younger and younger grades — and his technology teacher had raved about their educational benefits — so Susan wanted to do what was best for her sandy-haired boy who loved reading and playing baseball.

She started letting John play different educational games on his iPad. Eventually, he discovered Minecraft, which the technology teacher assured her was “just like electronic Lego.” Remembering how much fun she had as a child building and playing with the interlocking plastic blocks, Susan let her son Minecraft his afternoons away.

At first, Susan was quite pleased. John seemed engaged in creative play as he explored the cube-world of the game. She did notice that the game wasn’t quite like the Legos that she remembered — after all, she didn’t have to kill animals and find rare minerals to survive and get to the next level with her beloved old game. But John did seem to really like playing and the school even had a Minecraft club, so how bad could it be?

Still, Susan couldn’t deny she was seeing changes in John. He started getting more and more focused on his game and losing interest in baseball and reading while refusing to do his chores. Some mornings he would wake up and tell her that he could see the cube shapes in his dreams.

Although that concerned her, she thought her son might just be exhibiting an active imagination. As his behavior continued to deteriorate, she tried to take the game away but John threw temper tantrums. His outbursts were so severe that she gave in, still rationalizing to herself over and over again that “it’s educational.”

Then, one night, she realized that something was seriously wrong.

“I walked into his room to check on him. He was supposed to be sleeping — and I was just so frightened…”

She found him sitting up in his bed staring wide-eyed, his bloodshot eyes looking into the distance as his glowing iPad lay next to him. He seemed to be in a trance. Beside herself with panic, Susan had to shake the boy repeatedly to snap him out of it. Distraught, she could not understand how her once-healthy and happy little boy had become so addicted to the game that he wound up in a catatonic stupor.

There’s a reason that the most tech-cautious parents are tech designers and engineers. Steve Jobs was a notoriously low-tech parent. Silicon Valley tech executives and engineers enroll their kids in no-tech Waldorf Schools. Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page went to no-tech Montessori Schools, as did Amazon creator Jeff Bezos and Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales.

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by MindMake via MindMake Blog

Is It Okay To Ditch Your Kids? Yes, It Is

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The Huffington Post | Francis Sanzaro

Any time you have outside of sleep and work should pretty much be spent with your kids, right? Parenting is a time to get your shit together, put away the toys and whittle down the hours you used to spend in your twenties doing stuff that, in your thirties, now seems selfish at worst, or at best juvenile.

Not so. This is a recipe for disaster.

Now, you’ve got some issues. It just so happens these issues have names, personalities and, well, they are here because of something you did. These issues also have demands, certain ways of doing things and insist on “doing it themselves” despite a 100% projected failure rate, and yet, they lean on you exclusively — the plural “you” of parents or guardians — as to how to navigate the world before them. They are helpless.

Why are children “issues”? Because we’re busy doing the things we love and they get in the way. Children take time, a lot of time, a lot of my precious time and the world’s valuable time. Even the world’s resources for that matter. I bet 250 million gallons of gas were wasted yesterday alone on idling cars with parents waiting for their toddler to find their way out of the front door and into the car seat. This amazing phenomenon alone has contributed, in a significant way, to global warming. From spilled milk alone Eritrea could gather a day’s worth of calories and countless cows have had their utters needlessly yanked.

Children are issues not just for selfish parents, but parents with a passion. For me, climbing is a passion — it has been my raison d’etrefor the majority of my conscious life, beginning around thirteen, and remains so today. But, of late, I’ve stumbled into familiar parenting territory — is it selfish to spend less time with your kids so you can pursue your passion? On the surface of it, it sounds crass, as in “Seriously, you value your own weird little pursuit over that of raising the future generation??!!!” What an asshole.

Absence can be presence, and parenting is a strange thing. Do you remember a time when someone didn’t show up for something you considered really important? Of course you do. It was a defining moment. Well, that wasn’t the best example, but every time I get home from a climbing trip, my kids asked me how it was, what it was like, can they come next time, and so on. They tell me they too want to be climbers.

My absence is memorable to them, and my daughter is acutely aware that I chose “climbing over her.” She grinned when she said that, but it’s a direct quote. All the better. Why do I say that? Having a passion instills the sense that life has a telos — ultimate aim or purpose — and that it isn’t just eat, shit and breathe. It’s about vitality. Your kids learn you live for something they don’t comprehend, and that must be humbling. Humility is good. You give them this telos by performing it, believing in it yourself. Of course, make sure you give everyone else, such as your partner, equal time to nurture their passions as well.

Parenting, as much as anything — and I would argue more — forces you to experience time differently. Time, like the things in it, actually changes. Everything becomes more urgent, because it goes quicker, mainly because you are distracted and wiping asses and counting down from five all the time. You would think counting down from five so much would actually cause time to slow down, but the laws of physics don’t apply in this case.

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by MindMake via MindMake Blog

Should We Nix Homework? What Does Science Say?

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Live Science | Cari Nierenberg

A Texas teacher’s note to parents about her newly implemented “no formal homework policy” in her second-grade class went viral last week, opening up the floodgates for parents, teachers and school administrators to weigh in on this controversial topic.

In the note, teacher Brandy Young told parents that her students’ only homework would be work that they did not finish during the school day.

Instead of having kids spend time on homework, parents should “spend your evenings doing things that are proven to correlate with student success,” Young said. She recommended that parents “eat dinner as a family, read together, play outside and get your child to bed early,” strategies that she suggests are more closely tied to a child’s success in the classroom than doing homework.

Young’s rationale for her new policy, as she explained in her note, was that “research has been unable to prove that homework improves student performance.” [10 Scientific Tips for Raising Happy Kids]

Live Science spoke with three educators who have conducted research on homework and student performance to fact-check this statement, and to find out what studies have shown about homework’s positive and negative effects.

Keys to student success

It’s accurate to suggest that studies have found no correlation between homework in elementary school and a student’s academic performance, but there is one important exception worth mentioning, said Denise Pope, a senior lecturer at the Stanford University Graduate School of Education.

Research has shown that free reading, or allowing students to read whatever books they want, does improve their academic performance, Pope said. Some elementary school teachers assign free reading as homework, but kids and parents do not always perceive these assignments as true homework that must be completed, she explained. [Best Science-y Books for Kids]

In middle school, the evidence shows a slight correlation between doing homework and academic achievement, but further improvement fades after a middle-school student has spent 60 to 90 minutes a night doing homework, said Pope, who is also the co-founder of Challenge Success, an organization that works with schools and families to develop research-based strategies that engage kids and keep them healthy.

But it’s tricky to draw conclusions from homework studies, because these studies use such varied ways of measuring a student’s academic performance, Pope said. Some researchers use standardized test scoresto measure achievement, while others use students’ grade-point averages, she said.

Another variable that can complicate the results of homework studies is that it’s hard to know who is actually doing the assignment when it’s taken home, Pope said. For example, a student could get help from a parent, tutor, sibling or classmate to complete the work.

In high school, there is a strong correlation between students who do 2 hours of homework a night and higher levels of academic achievement, but again, this improvement fades when students exceed the 2-hour threshold, Pope told Live Science. [Top 5 Benefits of Play]

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Originally published on Live Science.

by MindMake via MindMake Blog

Joseph Garrett, The Children’s Presenter With 7.8 Million Viewers

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The Guardian | Stuart Dredge

The British YouTube star better known as Stampy has created a hugely popular web channel and educational show, but has no desire to do ‘proper’ TV

The biggest new children’s TV genre of recent years isn’t on broadcast television. It’s people posting videos on YouTube of themselves playing video game Minecraft and racking up billions of views from children around the world. One of those stars is Joseph Garrett, whose YouTube persona is a cat named Stampy. His channel has 7.8 million subscribers and its videos have been viewed 5.3bn times, making him one of the most popular British YouTube stars. Others include Dan Middleton, whose Minecraft-focused the Diamond Minecart channel has 12.2 million subscribers and 8bn views. YouTube’s biggest star so far is also a gamer, Brighton-based Swede Felix “PewDiePie” Kjellberg. His videos are not aimed at children, but he has an audience of 47.5 million YouTube subscribers and 13.2bn views. The popularity of their channels may baffle many parents, but to children these online creators are as influential as pop stars.

Still only in his mid-20s, Joseph Garrett has also developed a show called Wonder Quest with Disney-owned Maker Studios. It aims to teach science and maths to children using Minecraft and after 60m views of its first series has just returned for a second season.

How would you describe Wonder Quest to parents who haven’t seen the first series?

It’s not so different to a Saturday morning cartoon really. The characters are in a game called Minecraft, so they look blocky, but the way it’s filmed, edited and presented isn’t that dissimilar to a cartoon.

But because it is filmed in a game rather than acted or animated, we are controlling the characters. There’s an opportunity to improvise. Although we have a script, if we suddenly do something different or add a line, we can keep it in.

Season 2 is grander and more epic, but it’s also funnier. While it’s a show with education in, the priority is the entertainment. If it’s not entertaining, no one’s ever going to be able to enjoy it.

The trailer for Stampy’s YouTube channel.
How do you introduce science and maths concepts into the show without them seeming to be crowbarred in?

We always try to have it heavily embedded in the plot and relevant to what the characters are going through. We don’t try to force that side of the show.

It’s funny, because from talking to people, I think a lot of them don’t really look at it as an “educational” show. When I see comments or people messaging me looking forward to the next episode, they’re enjoying it as a show. It’s reaching a wide age range, which can make it hard to get the balance right to appeal to everyone. I don’t want to come across as too babyish or patronising. I just imagine I’m speaking to a friend.

Is there something specific about Minecraft that makes it a good backdrop for education and science?

I feel that Minecraft is a very good platform for so many different things: to tell stories, to teach, to do whatever you want to do. The great value is that so many children like it. Well, so many people from all different ages and parts of the world; there’s no age or gender bias.

For children and education, the fact that they love Minecraft is almost enough to get their attention already. If you’re a teacher in a classroom talking about Minecraft, right out of the gate your class might be paying more attention than if you were just writing on a whiteboard.

It’s a very natural way to teach and tell stories. When people think of games, it’s something you play from beginning to end with one story. Minecraft is more a plaything like plasticine or Lego. There’s so much depth to it and what you can do within it.

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by MindMake via MindMake Blog

Teaching Self Esteem In A Selfie World

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Family Online Safety Institute | Augusta Nissly

I recently took a trip with my family and my mom took a bunch of candid photos of me and I was not happy with any of them. Actually, I was furious with them. My arms looked awkward, my face too round and I have no idea what was going on with my left eye. Looking back there really was nothing wrong with them (sorry mom). I was being over critical and seeing flaws that just were not there. Pressure to look a certain way gets the best of all of us and our digital connectivity certainly can increase that pressure if we are not careful.

I think this is why selfies are so popular. Taking a selfie allows us to be in control of what we look like in photos, we can angle ourselves and contort our faces to look just the right way. THEN we can edit them with all the photo apps and tada we look perfect. Or what we think is perfect. The problem is that after we do all that contorting and editing we perceive ourselves to look that way and get upset when we see ourselves looking anything different. We fail to realize or accept what is reality because we edit reality out.

Selfies are not the answer to the growing self-esteem problem we have. And not allowing your child to use apps such as Instagram and Snapchat isn’t the answer either. Instead just like pretty much every other issue, the solution is to keep an open line of communication with your kids about self-esteem. Use the tips below to open up a conversation with your child about the images they share online and the images they see others posting.

1. Show them what is fake. Go online and look at a variety of pictures. Start by pointing out to your child what is real and what is not realistic. After a little bit show them pictures of people and let them point out to you what is fake.

2. Ask them why. If your child demands a photo not be posted, printed, framed or be deleted and you see nothing wrong with it, ask them what it is that bothers them about the photo. Do not approach it as they are wrong or silly for disliking the photo, but instead, phrase it as a genuine inquiry.

3. Don’t always use a filter. I get it filters are fun and I am guilty of always using them to enhance my photos. I apply all kinds of edits to get a photo just right. That is ok, but we also need to make sure our kids know they look amazing without a filter and a lot of editing. As a parent make sure you share photos of your child that are filter free, to enforce the idea that they don’t need a filter to look great.

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by MindMake via MindMake Blog

This Playground Is the Opposite of Helicopter Parenting

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New York Media | Science of Us | Jesse Singal

It’s easy to overgeneralize about parenting in 2016. Oftentimes, the trend- and think pieces written about “parenting” are really referring to how privileged people parent. Still, it’s safe to say that middle-class-and-richer parents these days do seem to be taking a rather overprotective approach. There’s a reason “helicopter parenting” is a term — it’s viewed as less and less acceptable to leave kids alone, to give them unstructured time in which to play and explore on their own terms. Overscheduling is in.

It wasn’t always this way. “Parents used to let elementary school-age kids play in the park with friends and siblings unsupervised, but they increasingly don’t let their progeny out of their sight until adolescence,”writes Ben Adler in Grist. “In some suburbs, parents can actually have their 10-year-old taken away by the government if the child is allowed to walk to a park unaccompanied.”

Adler has a nice story about a playground on Governors Island — which is just south of Manhattan in New York Harbor, and accessible by ferry — called play:groundNYC, which embraces a very different philosophy. When Adler first approached the playground on one of his reporting trips there, he was told by a security guard, “It’s more of a junkyard.” After parents sign a waiver, their kids are let loose on a small field full of “the detritus of New York’s consumer culture, including, on my visit, tires, a plastic water cooler, pieces of wood in all sorts of sizes and shapes, a stroller, and a stationary exercise bike,” where they do what kids have done forever: figure out how to have fun and make (and break) stuff. There are no parents allowed on play:groundNYC itself, but there are “playworkers” to help guide and keep an eye on the kids. Given all the junk lying around for the kids to play with, it’s inevitable that they will occasionally get dirty and scuffed up and scratched. In fact, that’s kind of the point.

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by MindMake via MindMake Blog

When It Comes To Parenting, Be A ‘Gardener’, Not A ‘Carpenter’

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The Telegraph | Susie Mesure

Are 21st-century parenting techniques harming our children, asks Susie Mesure

If permission to stop parenting sounds like the solution to surviving the rest of the summer holidays, then Alison Gopnik is your saviour. The US psychology professor and grandmother of three thinks too much “parenting” risks ruining your relationship with your children. It is also churning out a generation of young adults afraid to take risks.

What’s more, all that fussing and fretting over the daily minutiae is pointless: it won’t affect how your children turn out. Decades of research into how kids develop means that Gopnik, 61, can back up her claims; this is no mere backlash against overbearing “helicopter” parents.

Gopnik isn’t absolving parents of all responsibilities; children still need looking after. But parents should stop trying to “shape” their offspring into particular types of adults. “That is a doomed project and maybe even counterproductive,” she says via Skype from her home in Berkeley, northern California.

In her new book, The Gardener and the Carpenter, Gopnik launches a manifesto “against parenting”, a noun she points out first emerged only in 1958, according to the Merriam-Webster dictionary. “Parenting is a terrible invention. It hasn’t improved the lives of children and parents, and in some ways it’s arguably made them worse. It’s made relationships more intense, particularly in this latest generation of parents and children. The time that they are together is much more fraught and unhappy and guilt-ridden than it should be.”

She thinks older, middle-class mothers and father have turned parenting into an occupation to match the jobs they did before having children. This makes them hungry for results they can measure, like the degrees they notched up while studying.

“One reason why the parenting phenomenon emerged in the twentieth century was because really for the first time in history people were off trying to be parents on their own who had never taken care of children but who had gone to school and worked, so therefore they think, ‘OK, this is like another class I take at school.’”

Cue frustration when babies and small children turn out to be unpredictable. “You don’t know what your children are going to be like, and you can’t control what you’re going to be like as a parent. That’s kind of terrifying in a world where we are used to knowing how things are going to turn out.”

And yet, children are the last thing we should be trying to control. Gopnik, who is a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, where she runs a cognitive science laboratory, has pored over the science and struggled to find any empirical evidence to suggest parents should bother. “All those tiny differences in parenting that parents obsess over – co-sleeping versus letting the baby cry it out, putting the stroller frontward or backwards, exactly how much homework children do – the data show that none of that makes any difference in how the children turn out in the long run.”

In short, parents should stop worrying. “Leaving them alone is not a bad idea. We know children will innovate. When they organise a game, like football, then it’s not just that they’re learning how to play football, but are also learning who is a leader, who is a follower, how to divide people up. If they are in a sports league, all that stuff is being done for them.”

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Are Your Children Safe? Prevent Cyberbullying

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Inc. | Matthew Jones

Value your children’s independence and empower them to speak up against cyberbullying.

Cyberbullying is a real threat to children’s self-esteem. We live in a time when five year olds have iPhones, and sixth graders have full access to all that the internet has to offer–both positive and negative.

As a parent, it can be overwhelming to keep track of the multitude of ways they can get hurt. Cyberbullying has generated a lot of attention, in part because it’s almost impossible for a parent or teacher to prevent.

Whether you’re a teacher or parent, teaching children about internet etiquette is important, but don’t expect it to end the cyberbullying crisis. No matter how many times you tell a child not to do something, it’s up to them to end the behavior.

While working at Sankofa Psychological Services, a private practice in Chicago that specializes in providing therapeutic and diagnostic services to children and adults, I investigated cyberbullying.

My coworkers and I reviewed the top psychological literature concerning the topic of cyberbullying and how to prevent it. We condensed the findings into a presentation and then delivered a seminar to local schools to aid the teachers’ and administrators’ understanding of the issue and give policy recommendations.

Here are three ways that parents can prevent cyberbullying:

1. Acknowledge that cyberbullying is widespread.

Your child has either witnessed it, been a victim, or has bullied others.

Research shows that three to 24 percent of children experience ongoing cyberbullying, while upwards of 72 percent have reported at least one cyberbullying incident. This internet bullying peaks from the 5th to the 8th grade and then declines during high school.

2. Be aware that cyberbullying has severe consequences.

Children who experience cyberbullying are 1.5 times more likely to attempt suicidethan children who were not bullied.

Research showed that being involved in cyberbullying may better predict depression and suicidal ideation even more so than traditional bullying in children. Children that are cyberbullied or cyberbullies often have more acting out and behavioral problems than children that do not experience cyberbullying.

So if your child is feeling down or acting out, have a conversation about their social media and online peer interactions, and don’t be afraid to ask for professional help.

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by MindMake via MindMake Blog