Students use the internet to keep in touch with parents | Easier

A UK insurance firm has released the results of a study that looks at how students use the internet to keep in touch with parents: According to the study, parents rely heavily on social media platforms like Facebook to keep tabs on their children once they’ve...

10 ways your smartphone will help you travel with kids

It was 9:15 a.m., and the Eiffel Tower had barely opened for the day. Nonetheless, we faced a 90-minute line-up before our two young kids — ages 4 and 6, respectively — would get to take the trip up the tower that they had been begging for since the moment...

Family movie night: The 2×2

Like everything in life, the conundrum that is Family Movie Night can be reduced to a 2×2 table. Common Sense Media has solved a lot of our household media selection challenges, but it’s yet to resolve this one. Your kids will find this movie…  ...

The upside to teen life online

Frankasaurus has a great blog post about her experiences growing up online, comparing the impact of chat rooms on a socially awkward teenagers with the experience of using social media today. As she writes about her early years in online chat: It wasn’t long before I...

Discovering family through a social media crisis

My latest blog post for Harvard Business Review tackles the challenge of surviving a social media emergency. It was inspired by what turned out to be a minor emergency: the earthquake that rattled most of central Canada yesterday. As it happened, I was in Ottawa at...

A techsperiment that puts family tech use in a new light

Last week we conducted a techsperiment on eliminating gadgets from our family time: we swore off using iPhones, iPads and computers from the time we got home (5 or 6) until the time the kids were asleep (8 or 9). We did pretty well during the week, and discovered that...

Techsperiment days 3 & 4: going out without Twitter

Our effort at keeping devices off during family time — roughly three hours a night — continues. The biggest challenge of day 4 came when I realized it was 5 pm, and I’d yet to log day 3. Would I grant myself an exception, and blog for a few minutes...

Techsperiment day 1: the difficulty of unplugging with kids

24 hours into our vow to unplug — for just 3 hours a day! — and I am the weakest link. We’ve sworn to give up computers, iPhones and iPads between 6-9 every night (“family time”) but it’s day one and I’m already struggling....