parenting

Twitter might well be a repository for half-truths, halfwits, and even the half cut, but sometimes it has its uses.

One consists of trying to get your followers to provide some entertainment.

How can one not commend Nathan Fielder, star of Comedy Central's "Nathan For You," for creating art in action with the help merely of his followers, their phones, and their parents?

He took to Twitter and made a very simple request. He asked his followers to text their parents accidentally that they had drugs for sale and to screenshoot their reactions.

The text they were to send read: "Got 2 grams for $40." A price not to be sniffed at. They were then to offer an oopsie that the text had gone to the wrong recipient.… Read more

Weapons cost money.

This is something we hear all the time in discussions about budgets cuts.

It's also something the Kitchen family discovered when they gave their little 5-year-old Danny the passcode for their iPad.

Danny, you see, wanted to play Zombies vs. Ninja, a game that somehow has passed me by. Still, the future brigadier-general of the British army explained to his parents that the game was free.

Greg and Sharon Kitchen of Warmley, England, were busy entertaining, so what better way to keep their little 5-year-old quiet than to bury his fascination in an iPad?

As the Telegraph reports, … Read more

Even though smartphones and tablets can be both fun and useful for children, these devices also open children up to a dangerous world of unlimited information exchange. Whether it be inappropriate text exchanges, adult Web site content, or excessive usage that may rack up fees, Parental Control will help safeguard your kids.

Parental Control is quick to set up on a mobile device. For the most part it runs in the background and is not visible through normal use. The program itself is password-protected so the child may not simply disable it or delete it. The main portion of the … Read more

I had always imagined that adults entered the world of Facebook because they wanted to re-enact their teenage years, find a new lover, or "connect" with long-lost relatives whom they never really liked.

Yet a new piece of research has proved mind-altering.

My failure to regularly read the Education Database Online has been mitigated by Mashable and has led me to a new appreciation of the adult world.

For these vital statistics reveal that American parents aren't trying to imitate children so much as spy on them.

It's perfectly well-known that children can be trusted about … Read more

If there's one thing young people truly understand, it's bribery.

From their very formative years, parents bribed them to keep quiet, behave, wear appropriate clothing -- even, sometimes, desist from using rude words.

So it might seem utterly canny of Paul Baier, the vice president of a Massachusetts energy company, to find a veteran's method to get his daughter away from Facebook.

But this tale isn't quite so simple.

I am grateful to Daily Dot for revealing that Baier made 14-year-old Rachel sign a Facebook Deactivation Agreement, which he then posted to his own blog. … Read more

Sometimes the lure of Snapchat, Facebook, and Miley Cyrus' latest blouse can be too much.

It can lead you to iniquities. It can lead you to dishonoring your own family.

At least this is alleged to be the case in Placer County, Calif., where two teenage girls stand accused of spiking milkshakes in order to get online.

You might imagine that getting online doesn't normally involve involuntary unconsciousness. It normally results in it.

Police say, however, that one of the girls had parents with rules. As The Sacramento Bee describes it, the Internet was shut down at 10 p.… Read more

The Federal Trade Commission today moved to make a key children's online privacy law more up-to-date in a world of smartphones and social networks.

The agency has approved amendments to the regulations implementing the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act, or COPPA, that would require apps and Web sites that target children to obtain parental consent before collecting geo-location information, or photos, videos or audio files that include a child's image or voice. The law was also expanded to cover services that track kids' online activity -- namely, which sites they visit -- and then give the information … Read more

Parents are more worried about advertisers having access to their children's online data than about their children talking to strangers online, according to a report published today.

The Pew Internet Project and the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University collaborated on the report, which is based on a survey if 802 parents of children aged 12 to 17 with questions about social-networking sites, namely Facebook. As more and more teens and pre-teens use social media as a part of their every day communications , the study finds that parents worried about a variety of online dangers -- … Read more

Parents are often a little tipsy on power.

Where the real world leaves them powerless, family life affords them a little elbow room to show who's boss.

As a consequence, poor little children must suffer being trapped in the ultimate role of underling.

Please consider how cheesed off one poor daughter of Wisconsin must have been when her parents took away her phone for alleged insubordination.

Her brother, Reddit user AustinMac, was so moved by what her parents did next that he had to share it with the world.

For he claims they took pictures of themselves and posted … Read more