In the modern digital age we’ve seen an epidemic spike in mental health disorders–especially amongst young adults and teens. Skyrocketing rates of depression, anxiety, the opioid epidemic, a doubling of suicide rates, increased ADHD and overall malaise.
Virginia Clinton prefers to read on a screen. Her love affair with digital texts began when she was a new mother, juggling the workload of a young academic with diapers and feedings…
Four years ago, Paul France left a teaching job in the Chicago suburbs to move to San Francisco and be part of the so-called personalized-learning revolution in education. He joined a high-profile start-up called AltSchool…
Extensive training is the basis for giving teachers the autonomy to work the way they want. The result is a highly prized profession and an education system always near the top in international rankings…
one-year-old girl sweeps her fingers across an iPad’s touchscreen, shuffling groups of icons. In the following scenes she appears to pinch, swipe and prod the pages of paper magazines as though they too were screens…
A shift towards sedentary lifestyles has far reaching impacts on children’s health, including increased incidence of obesity, diabetes, asthma, and attention deficit disorders…
Changes in current societies are affecting childhood experiences. Time for outdoor play is diminishing, contributing to more sedentary lifestyles, disconnected from the natural world…
In Denmark, playful learning has meant allowing middle school students to design their own schedules for two weeks, for instance; or students drawing a map of the world onto an orange…
Media, from television to the “new media” (including cell phones, iPads, and social media), are a dominant force in children’s lives. Although television is still the predominant medium for children and adolescents, new technologies are increasingly popular…
Do students learn as much when they read digitally as they do in print? For both parents and teachers, knowing whether computer-based media are improving or compromising education is a question of concern…
In decades past, students needed little more than paper, pencils, and time to get their schoolwork done. For the vast majority of students, that’s no longer the case. Most schoolwork these days necessitates a computer and an internet connection…
Pasi Sahlberg’s Finnish Lessons was published exactly when it was most needed. When it appeared, the so-called education “reform” movement was ascendant in the United States and elsewhere and growing stronger…
Dogwood Canyon and the Cedar Hill ISD partnered on a study with 500 5th grade students to determine the impact of the Center’s customized Eco Investigations lessons on student academic performance including STAAR testing results…
Whenever a college student asks me, a veteran high-school English educator, about the prospects of becoming a public-school teacher, I never think it’s enough to say that the role is shifting from “content expert” to “curriculum facilitator.” …
When Steve Jobs was running Apple, he was known to call journalists to either pat them on the back for a recent article or, more often than not, explain how they got it wrong….
Despite spending his life creating one of the world’s biggest technology empires, he took a fairly strict view on gadgets when it came to his children…
Playing with blocks provides the opportunity for children to learn elements of science and math, like problem solving, counting, adding and subtracting, and helps them build both gross and fine motor skills…
Clifford the Big Red Dog looks fabulous on an iPad. He sounds good, too — tap the screen and hear him pant as a blue truck roars into the frame. “Go, truck, go!” cheers the narrator…
E-readers like Kindles and Nooks are portable and can store thousands of books. Other than being dependent on electrical power, e-readers seemed ready to replace print books completely when they debuted in 1998. But recent research suggests that print still rules, health-wise…
As parents, you are the biggest supporters of your children’s learning. You can make sure they have as much time to play as possible during the day to promote cognitive, language, physical, social, and emotional development…
The world in which today’s students will live and work is fundamentally different from the one in which their parents and teachers grew up. Rapid economic, technological and social changes are creating a world that is ever more interconnected and interdependent…
For about a month in the spring of 2013, I spent my mornings at Lakeside School, a private school in Seattle whose students are the scions of the Pacific Northwest elite. The beautiful red-brick campus looks like an Ivy League college and costs almost as much to attend…
Aided by the convenience and constant access provided by mobile devices, especially smartphones, 92% of teens report going online daily — including 24% who say they go online “almost constantly,”…
A student got out of his seat without warning, walked toward the window, and began to sob uncontrollably. Henderson approached the student, who quietly told her that the previous night he had made a deal with the devil, but wished he hadn’t…
Social media use has become so pervasive in the lives of American teens that having a presence on a social network site is almost synonymous with being online. Fully 95% of all teens ages 12-17 are now online and 80% of those online teens are users of social media sites…
Today around seven-in-ten Americans use social media to connect with one another, engage with news content, share information and entertain themselves. Explore the patterns and trends shaping the social media landscape over the past decade below…
The internet represents a fundamental shift in how Americans connect with one another, gather information and conduct their day-to-day lives. For more than 15 years, Pew Research Center has documented its growth and distribution in the United States. Explore the patterns of internet and home broadband adoption below…
In contrast to the largely stationary internet of the early 2000s, Americans today are increasingly connected to the world of digital information while “on the go” via smartphones and other mobile devices. Explore the patterns and trends that have shaped the mobile revolution below…
A plurality of experts say digital life will continue to expand people’s boundaries and opportunities in the coming decade and that the world to come will produce more help than harm in people’s lives. Still, nearly a third think that digital life will be mostly harmful to people’s health, mental fitness and happiness. Most say there are solutions…
How quickly should employees respond to emails? In most workplaces the answer is “right away.” But scientific research is starting to suggest that managers need to recognize the effect that being “always on” has on employee stress and overall efficiency…
Most of us will freely admit that we are obsessed with our devices. We pride ourselves on our ability to multitask—read work email, reply to a text, check Facebook, watch a video clip…
It was late May in a conference room at Capital City Public Charter School and Nia Reese, an eighth grader dressed in a business suit, guided her audience through a PowerPoint presentation…
Pasi Sahlberg is a Finnish educator and scholar. He has worked as schoolteacher, teacher educator and policy advisor in Finland and has studied education systems and reforms around the world. His expertise includes international educational change, future of schooling, and innovation in teaching and learning…
Although environmental inequality researchers have increased our understanding of race- and class-based environmental inequality in many important ways, few environmental inequality studies ask whether children are disproportionately burdened by environmental pollution…
In the last two decades, childhood has moved indoors. The average American child spends as few as 30 minutes in unstructured outdoor play each day and more than seven hours each day in front of an electronic screen…
I’ve been researching generational differences for 25 years, starting when I was a 22-year-old doctoral student in psychology. Typically, the characteristics that come to define a generation appear gradually, and along a continuum…
Do experiences with nature – from wilderness backpacking to plants in a preschool, to a wetland lesson on frogs—promote learning? Until recently, claims outstripped evidence on this question. But the field has matured, not only substantiating previously unwarranted claims but deepening our understanding of the cause-and-effect relationship between nature and learning…
New research out of the UK has found yet another benefit of picking up a good book, with avid readers likely to feel satisfied with their lives. The study, conducted by the University of Liverpool’s Centre for Research into Reading, Literature and Society (CRILS), found that reading has many more benefits than simply being good entertainment…
In recent years, print books have seen a resurgence, and for good reason—they can be better for your brain and health, according to science. Here are just a few of the reasons why…
The most prevalent mental disorder experienced among adolescents is depression, with more than one in four high school students found to have at least mild symptoms of this condition.
Do you have a child struggling with emotional, learning, sensory, or behavioral issues that are so disruptive you’re pulling your hair out? Does the littlest thing set them off? Does your child seem “wired and tired”–that is, agitated but exhausted at the same time? Are you trying different treatments and strategies but nothing’s working?
The Center on Media and Child Health (CMCH) at Boston Children’s Hospital (BCH) is an academic research center whose mission is to educate and empower children and those who care for them to create and consume media in ways that optimize children’s health and development. Founded in 2003 by pediatrician, father, and former Hollywood filmmaker Michael Rich, CMCH focuses on media as a powerful environmental health influence, like the air we breathe and the water we drink.
This blog began life as part of a research project called ‘Parenting for a Digital Future,’ part of the Connected Learning Research Network funded by the MacArthur Foundation. It has since grown into a wider examination of the many questions that arise now that children are growing up in a digital world.
CCFC is the leading nonprofit organization committed to helping children thrive in an increasingly commercialized, screen-obsessed culture, and the only organization dedicated to ending marketing to children. Our advocacy is grounded in the overwhelming evidence that child-targeted marketing – and the excessive screen time it encourages – undermines kids’ healthy development.
Founded in Concord, MA, Turning Life On is an expansion and extension of Concord Promise, a local, public support platform that encourages parents to delay smartphones until at least 8th grade.
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