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Being Intentional With Technology: How We Introduced Our Kids to Social Media and Devices
Raising kids in a fast-moving digital world is hard—here’s the intentional plan our family used to make it manageable.
Phone-Free Schools Are Starting to Work. The Headlines Missed It.
My biggest distractions in school were a paper football, a folded love note, and daydreaming. Teachers today are competing with a Personal Pocket Computer in every other hand. Early research on phone-free schools is better than the headlines, but the real point is not a test score. A kid is more than a profile, and school should still feel like school.
Something Bigger Is Happening
In March I wrote about Matt Shumer’s warning that AI was moving faster than most people realize. This month, people inside the labs started saying the gap is even wider — and a July test that left a sealed environment and reached a real company made that hard to dismiss as a headline. I am still an optimist. I just want us to be educated ones before 2028 starts to feel strange.
Is Gen Z Losing Trust, or Missing the Practice It Takes to Build It?
Gen Z reports historically low levels of trust, but could a lack of face-to-face practice be part of the reason? Here is how adults can help young people navigate conflict, build trust and develop deeper human connections.
The Personal Pocket Computer: What Gen Z Knows About Growing Up Online
I often call the smartphone a Personal Pocket Computer because that is what it really is. Think about how much time you spent today talking to someone on your “phone” compared with how much time you spent searching, scrolling, watching, shopping, working, taking pictures, checking directions, sending messages or consuming information. Making phone calls may be one of the things we do least with it.
More Than a Profile: Remembering the Human Behind the Screen
After spending hours on social media, a person can begin to feel like little more than something in the scroll. A human being becomes a photograph, a username, a comment, or a brief collection of LED pixels that appears for a few seconds before we swipe to whatever comes next.
The Last Generation to Grow Up Before the Digital World
I remember when a stick could become a sword, a rifle or a tool for exploring a creek, and today I can take a picture of that same stick and ask an artificial intelligence system what kind of tree it came from. I feel blessed to have experienced both.
Some Teens Are Using AI for Mental Health Advice Before They Talk to Adults
It makes sense that a student walking into a counseling office may have already tried to sort things out with AI first. They may have asked ChatGPT, Gemini, Snapchat’s My AI, Character.AI, or another chatbot about stress, anxiety, sadness, loneliness, relationships, family conflict, friendship problems, or something they were not ready to say out loud yet.