This holiday season if, like many parents, you’re wrapping up a smart phone, tablet or other electronic gadget or game for your child, there’s a must-have accessory: the family agreement.

You can print one out for free courtesy of the Family Online Safety Institute’s Platform for Good. PfG calls it an “online safety card,” but there’s more to it than that. You can spell out how much time your child can be online, which sites are okay to visit, and how much money (if any) your child can spend on apps, but you also promise to be supportive of your child’s use of the new item and not over-react if he or she stumbles on something you deem offensive. Continue reading →

Can one dad who cares about getting kids to ride their bikes to school convince a million kids to do it? Well, Jeff Anderson has had that chance – and why I’m featuring his story on Blog Action Day, whose theme this year is “The Power of We.”

Jeff’s goal is simple. He loved the independence and fun of riding to school and wants today’s kids to be able to do the same. At first, he rode only with his own three kids to their elementary school in a traffic-clogged suburb of Washington, D.C. But soon neighbors began to join in, so Jeff formed a “bike train” of kids, described on The Durable Human two years ago.   Continue reading →