Digital Parents: Resources

Referred to by many as the “Margaret Mead of digital culture,” Professor Turkle has investigated the intersection of digital technology and human relationships from the early days of personal computers to our current world of robotics, artificial intelligence, social networking and mobile connectivity. Her New York Times best-seller, “Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age” (Penguin Press, October 2015), focuses on the importance of conversation in digital cultures, including business and the professions. Her previous book, “Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other” (Basic Books, 2011), was a featured talk at TED2012, describing technology’s influence on relationships between friends, lovers, parents and children, and new instabilities in how we understand privacy and community, intimacy and solitude.

When 8th grader Sonia Bokhari joined social media for the first time, she discovered that her mom and sister had been posting about her for her entire life.

Educate and Empower Kids (EEK) provides resources to parents and educators to encourage deep connection with their kids through media education, meaningful family communication and intentional parenting. We believe this must be done by teaching digital citizenship, media literacy, and healthy sexuality education—including education about the dangers of online pornography.

Lawyer and social researcher David Gillespie has been delving into the complex business of the teenage brain.
He says the usual teenage compulsions like smoking, drinking and drug taking are in steep decline, as teenagers are now more likely to seek a pleasure hit from their screens.
But the games and social media apps they use are deliberately engineered to be addictive.
Unlike drugs and cigarettes, their devices are supported by schools and parents, with few restrictions on their use.

No one cares more about your child's well-being and success than you do. In today's digitally-fueled times, that means guiding him or her not just in the real world but in the always-on virtual one as well. Teach your children to use technology in a healthy way and pick up the skills and habits that will make them successful digital citizens. From 2-year-olds who seem to understand the iPad better than you to teenagers who need some (but not too much) freedom, we’ll walk you through how to make technology work for your family at each stage of the journey.

When the reading brain skims texts, we don’t have time to grasp complexity, to understand another’s feelings or to perceive beauty. We need a new literacy for the digital age

Has habitual Internet browsing altered kids’ brains? In this excerpt from his new book The Reading Mind: A Cognitive Approach to Understanding How the Mind Reads, Daniel T. Willingham argues that the brain is always changing, so the effects of web activities aren’t likely to be permanent. In fact, the biggest challenge for young readers may be staying focused on the printed page when having a smartphone means they never have to be bored.

Children’s earliest experiences of written language increasingly involve digital text — on phones, tablets and computers. This shift has triggered worry about the potential harm to children’s ability to read in a deep, focused manner on the one hand, and optimism for the potential of technology to support reading among different groups on the other. In this article, we explore research evidence concerning the impact of digital text on children’s developing literacy skills. Our review advocates the need for a more nuanced understanding regarding the challenges and potential of digital environments and highlights the uniqueness of each child’s digital reading experience.

Lynn talks with neuroscientist Dr Maryanne Wolf, director of the center for dyslexia, diverse learners and social justice, at UCLA whose research looks at how the brain takes on knowledge. She says research is surfacing in many parts of the world suggesting that those who read on digital devices don’t comprehend as well, don’t sequence details well and don’t recall the plot as well as those reading the same material in print.

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