Internet Parenting, Parental Controls, & Online Safety Blog - WebCurfew

By Hilary Smith - Were Smartphones and digital devices at the top of your kids’ wish list this past Christmas? With one in every five mothers of children between 4-7 intending to buy digital devices for their children during the holiday season, it is likely you bought one for your child too. Their small eyes no doubt glowed with excitement as they opened the neatly wrapped present under the tree, while you also glowed, happy in knowing you were able to provide them that special present they had been longing for.

It’s a truism. Every millennial parent is uneasy about the amount of time there children are spending connected to the internet. Collectively we all feel our internet-age children are spending too much time online, but most of us – for a variety of reasons – aren’t doing much about it.

By Amy Kristine Williams -- I love privacy. It’s one of the foundations of our society - and when our lives are kept private, it’s so much easier to be who we want to be, without worrying so much about what others think. Maybe that’s why teens are so enamored with the internet - many of them still haven’t discovered who they are, and the chance to cut loose and feel like they belong must be amazing.

A recent study by Dr. Aric Sigman, a Fellow of the UK Royal Society of Medicine found that by the age of seven the average child will have spent a full year of 24-hour days watching recreational screen media. And over the course of their childhood, children spend more time watching TV than they spend in school.

A recent study by Iowa State University (ISU), and published in JAMA Pediatrics, found that children behave better, do better in school, get more sleep, and see other health benefits when parents limit content and the amount of time they spend on the computer, in front of the TV, or other connected devices.

The school year is almost over… and summer is just around the corner. I can sense it. This has been a brutal winter almost everywhere around the country, but especially here in Chicago where I live. Now that the weather is getting warmer, the first thing that comes to my mind is, “how can I spend more time outside?”

Hello everyone, I am Alberto Moriondo, and I will start contributing to the Digital Loitering Blog. I thought I would share with you an interview that I just did for BlueSky Innovation, a Chicago-Tribune website focusing on news, analysis and events related to innovation and entrepreneurship

The holiday season is by now a distant memory for most people (except perhaps for the credit card bills) but many parents are suffering from digital whiplash as they try and figure out how their child became so addicted to the internet-enabled consumer electronics device they bought them for Christmas!

Cyberbullying….would you know if your child has been a victim of it, a witness to it, or perhaps even a perpetrator of it? Most parents think they know what cyberbullying is. However, you may be surprised to learn it’s a lot more expansive than you think.

In my last Digital Loitering blog post I revealed my biased towards the act of playing a video game over the act of play a musical instrument. I admitted feeling that somehow playing endless hours of video games felt like a timewaster, while spending the equivalent amount of time play an instrument somehow felt like a more useful endeavor.