For their children to be durable, it isn’t enough anymore for parents to merely teach them crucial stuff like manners and how to hammer a nail. Add to the list everything to do with Technology. Yet, many view the vast Internet Ocean with fear and trepidation–especially if their kids have already jumped in. This concerns digital instigators such as Facebook, Google and Microsoft who want everyone to feel comfortable and safe in the water. And that’s why they’ve teamed up with the Family Online Safety Institute to teach swimming lessons on a new website called A Platform for Good. Continue reading →

Last time, we saw that being able to bicycle has historically given women a special sense of freedom. Well, kids like freedom, too. Not so long ago, lots of them biked or walked to school and very few were driven. Today those numbers have flipped. Now, in part because they’re getting less regular exercise, kids are prone to put on weight and develop health problems previously limited to adults.

But a scrappy federal program called Safe Routes to School is bucking the trend. SRTS offers elementary schools no-strings-attached grants for things like adding sidewalks or educating communities about the lost art of active transportation. Last fall, SRTS gave out “mini-grants” for taking small steps to make big changes in kids’ health and happiness. Continue reading →

How teens get along within social networks reflects what happens in real life – for good and for bad.

Just as they do face to face, kids love to socialize online. Four out of five online teens hang out on social networks. Some of them may like to tweet or dabble in MySpace, but practically all have a profile on Facebook. “No one had any idea how quickly and or how widely this would spread,” says Stephen Balkam, director of the Family Online Safety Institute which sponsored the new report by the Pew Research Center.

The majority of kids between age 12 and 17 think people are mainly friendly in the digital space. But many, especially black teens, have witnessed mean and cruel behavior. Some younger girls have been so shook up by what they’ve seen, they were worried about going to school the next day. Continue reading →