Parenting in a Tech World

For teens in foster care, smartphone safety cuts both ways. No phone leaves them cut off from peers who live on Snapchat and Instagram, while an unmonitored one exposes already vulnerable kids to unsafe adults online. Jordyn Braun, MSW, has spent over three years as a Team Lead and Case Manager in Oregon Community Programs’ treatment foster care, and Jami Teran is a first-time foster parent who just guided her youth through senior year and the move toward college. Host Adam Brooks hears from b

For years, one Oregon foster care program kept kids and smartphones completely separate, until the kids themselves said a no-phone rule was reason enough to pick a different program. What that team learned about screen time, supervision, and teen mental health applies to every family, not just kids in foster care. Ana Day is a licensed marital and family therapist who has spent 21 years at Oregon Community Programs, working her way from therapist to Executive Director of an agency serving foste

If you've ever felt like you need permission to take away your child's iPad or delete Snapchat from your 12-year-old's phone, you're not alone, and that hesitation is one of the biggest reasons screen time limits fall apart at home. The good news: you have far more power here than you think. Katherine Martinko, author of Childhood Unplugged and the upcoming Hold the Phone, spent over a decade as a digital media editor and has delivered more than 70 keynotes and workshops on kids and screens acr

Kids in foster care are among the most targeted groups for online predators and grooming, and taking their phones away often makes them less safe, not more. Adam Rodakowski is the Director of Foster Care at Greater Oregon Behavioral Health, where he leads a treatment foster care program serving 40 to 50 youth after nearly a decade in Oregon's child welfare system. He shares the two warning signs that forced his team to act. One was a teen who kept showing up with brand-new phones within days of

Sleepover safety today means more than sleeping bags and flashlights. It means knowing what happens to unsupervised phones, cameras, and internet access once the lights go out at someone else's house. Titania Jordan, Bark's Chief Parent Officer and bestselling author of two books on digital parenting, breaks down the framework she calls the “sleep under.” You'll learn how to protect your home Wi-Fi with tools like the Bark Home, why a device basket at the door removes temptation instead of rel

Discord is rated 17+ in the App Store, but kids can sign up at 13, a gap that leaves most parents feeling a step behind the moment their kid asks to join. This year Discord rolled out teen-by-default settings, a new age verification system, and a parental controls tool called Family Center, and today we break down what actually changed, what didn't, and the one gap no setting can fix. You'll learn what "teen by default" actually restricts day to day, how Discord's age verification works (and wh