Parenting in a Tech World

Holiday tech gifts can turn a magical morning into months of screen addiction, especially when the gift is a first phone, a gaming console, or a surprise iPad from Grandma. School breaks also bring looser rules, unsupervised time with cousins, and travel that quietly opens new safety gaps. Titania Jordan, Bark’s Chief Parent Officer and bestselling author of two books on digital parenting, opens up about the PlayStation 5 Christmas gift she still regrets and what she would do differently. Tita

Worried about how much screen time your kids get at school? In some Utah classrooms, iPads were coming out on the first day of kindergarten, and kids on school devices kept sneaking off to Roblox, Minecraft, and YouTube. Representative Ariel Defay, a mom of three and Vice Chair of the Utah House Education Committee, sponsored HB 273, the Balance Act, after years of parents asking her for help, and her earlier work took on AI-generated explicit images of kids. She breaks down what will actually

Social media apps like Snapchat and Instagram are designed to keep kids scrolling, and for some families the cost of that design has been devastating. Carson Bride was just 16 when he was cyberbullied through anonymous apps built into Snapchat, and he died by suicide in 2020. Kristin Bride, Carson’s mom, founded the Carson J. Bride Effect and has testified before Congress, while Trisha Prabhu built the anti-cyberbullying tool ReThink at age 13 and now runs ReThink Citizens, a nonprofit helping

Screen time battles have become a nightly fight in many homes, and pediatricians are seeing the fallout in the exam room: kids who aren’t sleeping, struggle to hold a conversation, and melt down the moment a device is taken away. Dr. Lisa Petit is a board-certified pediatrician with nearly 20 years in practice, a background in psychology, and three teens of her own. She joins Titania Jordan, Bark’s Chief Parent Officer and bestselling author of two books on digital parenting, to walk through h

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