How does Big Tech really see your child? As a fledgling digital citizen to be nurtured?  Or a pipeline to ever-greater profits? To prevent children - aka future revenue - from defecting to a competing app, Instagram has been stalking the teen market like a digital sheep in wolf’s clothing, according to internal documents released this week. The unsuspecting target? “Early high school-ers” - classified as 13- to 15-year-olds. Why this age group? Because it represents the major conduit to Instagram’s parent, Facebook, whose ageing user base has been a major concern for the company’s future ..read more

A new survey of 2000 mums and dads with school-age children found overwhelming agreement: It’s harder than ever to let kids be kids. The reason? Technology of course. Fully eight out of ten parents said raising children was harder today than 30 years ago. And an even greater number agreed that today’s digital kids are growing up too fast. Yet most of us have mixed feelings about technology. On the one hand, we appreciate its tremendous benefits in the everyday lives of our children - and are allowing access at ever-earlier ages. On the other hand, worry about the impact of all that screen-time ..read more

Digital parenting styles are a definite thing - and in a world where online learning is here to stay, the style you adopt is more important than ever. Digital parenting, experts remind us, is first and foremost - well, parenting. Just as in the rest of life, doing it well depends on finding that sweet spot between love and limits.  Well before the advent of the Age of Google, developmental psychologists identified four basic parenting styles:  permissive, authoritative, authoritarian and neglectful. Each has been found to have a different impact on child behaviour. And each is identi ..read more

Experts are warning of a coming wave of school refusal - and kids who suffer from a ‘digital hangover’ are at special risk. There’s been no shortage of family stressors these school holidays. Just when we thought it was safe to relax into summer fun, the Omicron invasion sent COVID case numbers spiraling to unprecedented heights. With restrictions reintroduced, travel cut off, and the threat of contagion hanging over holiday plans like a thundercloud, it’s no wonder so many of us have sought solace - and safety - in our screens. Scrolling endlessly through our feeds. Playing the kinds of games ..read more

How much screen-time is “just right” for your child? Applying the Goldilocks Principle to children’s device use means figuring out where their individual sweet spot lies: not too much, not too little, but just right.  Every digital parent alive worries about too much time online. But a new Australian study shows that there’s such a thing as not enough time online. Specifically, researchers that phone use actually helped teens cope better with stress. But there was a caveat: that use needed to be “moderate.” Goldilocks would have understood. The study, published in Clinical Psychological S ..read more

Allowing your kids to experience “the presence of an absence” is a parental duty you may never have thought about before.  But in our distraction-filled digital times, boredom can be a boon to kids’ creativity, mood-regulation and personal growth. Is it true, as some of us glibly insist, that “there is no such thing as boredom – only boring people?” Admittedly,  it’s a good line. But the science suggests otherwise. Boredom is real. And not only real but potentially really important to our kids’ capacity to think and create and achieve mastery. Like a fallow field, the mind of a “bore ..read more

If you have more than one child - and statistics show 86 percent of families do - then managing screen-time can be double trouble. Or triple or quadruple or … Families with two children are the Australian norm today, according to the latest figures from the Australian Institute of Family Studies (AIFS), with one-child families accounting for only 14% of the total. (Fun fact: As recently as 1981, families were twice s likely to have three kids as two!)  While big families can bring big joy, they can also bring big challenges for digital parents. Quite simply, the more kids you have, the mo ..read more

We’re starting to understand how social media can damage girls’ self-esteem - but what about our boys? New research finds disturbing evidence of equal opportunity risk for young males. It’s not just girls. Boys too are getting powerful messages about body image from social media.  While most studies of social media’s impact on body satisfaction have focused on girls and young women, a rising tide of new research is investigating the impacts on the opposite gender. And the picture that’s emerging is depressingly familiar. “For many boys and young men, muscle worship has become practically ..read more

This holiday season, many kids have only a single item on their wishlist: a smartphone. Should you give in to the pleading (“I neeeeeeed a phone!”) and the promises (“Of course you can trust me to be sensible!!!!!!”)? And if you do, what's the best way to support a healthy digital journey? That first phone is a rite of passage for today’s kids. And it’s a milestone that’s happened at ever-younger ages. According to Finder's Parenting Report 2021, which surveyed 1,033 Aussie parents, over a third (35%) of kids under 12 now have a smartphone - a whopping 50% increase from just three years ago.&n ..read more

Mixing kids and adult strangers in a self-moderated online environment ... What could possibly go wrong? “Hello? Where are you?”  “I can’t find you. Can you give me a hint?” The plaintive voice calling from a virtual palace corridor definitely sounded like a child. But how could that be? In the new virtual reality app Horizon Worlds, kids aren’t allowed.  Kids are everywhere  But when The Washington Post trialled Meta’s much-heralded metaverse, it encountered children instantly - some as young as nine. Other early reviewers have detailed multiple encounters with children, “some ..read more