parenting

On Tuesday, I wrote about the misinformation surrounding Mass Effect, a highly rated Xbox 360 game. I pointed out that, even if the game contained the obscenities various news outlets have falsely claimed it to have, parents can easily restrict their children from playing it on their Xbox 360. It's a simple matter of entering the "Family Settings" menu on the Xbox 360 dashboard, making up a passcode your kids won't find out, and setting the level of the games you want them to play. Keep it set to EC or E if you have young … Read more

I spent the whole day at CES attending the Sandbox Summit, an ambitious new specialty session put on by the Parents' Choice Foundation. We heard presentations from over 20 speakers, from Nickelodeon and Sesame Workshop (an Elvis-impersonating Elmo showed up live as a keynote speaker!), to Michelle Slatalla, Cyberfamilias columnist at The New York Times; Anastasia Goodstein, founder of YPulse.com; and Warren Buckleitner, editor of Children's Technology Review. The five panels addressed topics in depth and from several angles, including marketing, safety, the quality and effectiveness of educational media, and the question of how families can develop reasonable limits on screen time. I will be covering the details this five-hour summit in many upcoming blog posts.

The Sandbox Summit was well-attended and I had the most amazing networking experience afterward, talking to other women who attended as audience members. … Read more

A baby's kicks in the womb are something like family pictures: The only people who really care about them are the parents. So it's understandable if others might have doubts about the usefulness of products like the "KickTrak."

As its name implies, this device tallies kicks from 24 weeks into the pregnancy, according to OhGizmo, ostensibly to make sure that the baby is healthy and active. Although this may seem dubious to some, this may be beneficial to nervous parents like us who have slept with one eye open while worrying 24/7 during the full … Read more

With a new year comes new computers, and that means new security problems. Viruses, spyware, rootkits, hackers--a fresh machine can be susceptible to the most insidious of plots. Lucky for you, here in the CNET Download.com defense bunker, we've devised a list of essential and free top-rated security programs to protect the honor of your computer and ensure that your sanity will last longer than your resolutions.

… Read more

iParenting Media has become Disney's latest Mouseketeer. The Walt Disney Internet Group announced Tuesday it acquired iParenting Media.

The mouse house plans to integrate iParenting's content, reviews, and services into Disney Online's family oriented Web sites such as FamilyFun.com, Wondertime.com, and Family.com.

Besides offering content generated by various experts and professional writers, as well as users, iParenting operates a product review site, iParenting Media Awards. That, too, will be integrated into the Disney sites.

And financial terms of the deal? The mouse ain't talking.

Amid continued outcry over the MySpace.com hoax that preceded a teenager's suicide, the town of Dardenne Prairie, Mo., has passed a law banning online harassment.

Although it's only a misdemeanor with a maximum penalty of 90 days in jail or a $500 fine, the law is specifically targeted at the kind of online attack that Meier faced in the days prior to her death last year.

"It is our hope that by supporting one of our own in Dardenne Prairie, we can do our part to ensure this type of harassing behavior never happens again, anywhere,&… Read more

I caught CNET Editor at Large Brian Cooley on the CBS Evening News report last night, "The Secret Lives of Teens." In the second installment of this three-parter, which featured a tug-of-war between a daughter and her mother concerned about her risky online behavior, Cooley observed that, "This is just the return of the Cold War, with different players. Instead of the U.S. and Russia, it's Mom and Dad versus Joey and Bill." Cooley talked about parental control technology but added that, "In the end, this points back to the parenting relationship, and it moves away from technology when you really have to make a difference in their lives...you cannot rely on software."

I agree with Cooley's conclusion. Online safety for teens is a complex issue that cannot be covered in one blog post, but the CBS Evening News series gave me a lot of food for thought. They posed the question, is parental spying on teen Internet use an "invasion of privacy or smart parenting?" and I wish the CBS series had given more consideration to the possibility that digital spying is a misguided parenting practice.… Read more

Getting ready for work this morning, I caught a Today Show interview with the parents of Megan Meier, the 13-year-old that I wrote about on Saturday, who committed suicide last year after being taunted on MySpace.

Meier believed she had been chatting on the social network with a boy named Josh. At first, "Josh" sent friendly messages, but after a few weeks, he abruptly turned accusatory and insulting.

Meier's parents found out several weeks after their daughter's death that Josh was actually not a boy, but rather the fictional creation of adults, including the mother of … Read more

It's an unimaginably sad story.

Megan Meier, a 13-year-old girl who has struggled with issues of self-esteem and depression, is greeted on MySpace by an older boy. He strikes up a flirtation with her over a series of weeks. Then, inexplicably, he starts sending accusatory messages, then nasty ones.

Megan, crushed by the turn of events, takes her own life.

Further twisting the tragedy is the fact that the boy wasn't a boy at all. Rather, he was the creation of adults, including the mother of one of Megan's friends, a girl with whom she had a … Read more