Episodes

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...

Standardized test scores among American kids have been dropping for years, and one neuroscientist says classroom technology is a direct cause, not a coincidence. Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath is a neuroscientist and educator who has studied learning at Harvard University, Harvard Medical School, and the University of Melbourne, and his latest book, "The Digital Delusion," has led him to testify before the U.S. Senate. In this conversation, Jared breaks down what happens in a child's brain when they ...

Every month, 430 students at one Texas high school watched two of their own classmates lead an assembly on cyberbullying, online predators, and the gap between who teens are online and who they really are. McKenzey Roach and Malayna Mitchell are graduating seniors who built and ran their school's monthly digital citizenship program, called CHAT, reaching every student at Lubbock-Cooper High School as part of a DECA project. In this conversation, they walk through how a mandatory video segment ...

Cyberbullying, drug conversations, sextortion risk, and violent threats aren't just happening on your kid's phone, they're showing up on school-issued laptops too. New Bark for Schools data breaks down exactly how often, by category and by state. Titania Jordan, Chief Parent Officer at Bark Technologies, shares data from Bark's work protecting students across more than 3,700 school districts nationwide since the program launched free in response to the Parkland shooting. In this episode, you'l...

The teachers walking into classrooms right now grew up glued to screens too, and that's reshaping how teacher prep programs handle screen addiction, shortened attention spans, and phone distraction in the classroom.  Melanie Lay and Amy Hickman train future educators at Texas Tech University, and both also evaluate teacher preparation programs nationwide, Melanie through US PREP and Amy as a TPI-US inspector. In this conversation, they break down what's actually being taught to future teache...

Behind every Bark Phone, Watch, Home, or Sync that arrives on your doorstep, there's a team of real people, not robots, who packed it by hand. In this episode, you'll meet the humans responsible for making sure your child's safety device gets to your family the right way. Shari manages Bark's distribution center in Utah, and Crystal is the operations support specialist who keeps daily operations running. You'll hear what it was like to build the distribution center from an empty warehouse into...

Online predators are actively targeting your kids right now, and two Michigan men decided they couldn't wait for the system to act. Jake Hockey and C.J. of Pred Task Force built a team that runs undercover stings, with decoys posing as minors on dating apps, confronting suspects on camera, and calling law enforcement when the time is right. Jake and C.J. are citizen investigators who have grown Pred Task Force from a local Michigan operation into a nationwide mission, with hundreds of thousands...

The invisible mental load of early parenthood — tracking feeds, monitoring sleep, anticipating every need — is one of the most exhausting and least-talked-about realities of having a baby. Nanit's latest parent report pulls back the curtain on what's actually happening in homes across the country during those first overwhelming years. Victoria Vaynberg is the Chief Customer and Marketing Officer at Nanit, the smart baby monitor and parenting platform used by millions of families — and she's spe...

Financial sextortion is targeting teenage boys at an alarming rate — and most families have never heard of it until it's too late. In 2022, 17-year-old Gavin Guffey fell victim to an online blackmail scam and died by suicide. His father, South Carolina State Representative Brandon Guffey, refused to let Gavin's death be the end of the story. Rep. Guffey is one of the driving forces behind Gavin's Law, one of the nation's first pieces of legislation specifically targeting financial sextortion — ...

Diane Tarantini is a survivor, author, and body safety educator whose work is bringing one of the most underreported forms of child sexual abuse into the open. In this episode, she shares the story behind her children's book The Brave Knight — which teaches kids to recognize grooming and speak up — her memoir Everyone Was Silent, and why child-on-child sexual abuse is being called America's silent epidemic. If you've ever wondered how to talk to your kids about body safety or what warning signs ...

Jen Davidson spent years raising two kids with a simple but powerful ritual — intentional conversations she called Life Lesson Lunches — and her grown children loved it so much they asked her to write it all down so they could use it someday as parents themselves. In her book Keep Talking, Jen offers a warm, practical roadmap for staying connected with kids even when they're doing everything to push you away. We get into the book, the unconventional origin story behind it, and what Jen has learn...

What does it actually feel like to be the kid on the other side of all that well-intentioned parenting technology? Audra and Savanna grew up navigating learning challenges with tools, apps, and monitoring software shaping their daily lives — and they're here to tell the truth about what helped, what felt like a leash, and what they wish the adults in their lives had done differently. If you've ever wondered whether the tech you're using is building your child's independence or quietly underminin...

Heisman Trophy winner and Tim Tebow Foundation founder Tim Tebow has spent years on the front lines of fighting child sexual exploitation — and what he's seen should be on every parent's radar. In this episode, Tim breaks down the online predators hiding in the apps and platforms your kids use every day, what it took to pass landmark federal legislation protecting children online, and the real link between social media and the mental health crisis facing today's kids. If you've ever wondered whe...

Catherine Price is an award-winning health and science journalist, #1 New York Times bestselling author, and founder of Screen/Life Balance — and she's here to cut through the overwhelm parents feel around phones and screens. In this episode, Catherine shares what actually works for families trying to reclaim balance, including insights from her newly revised How to Break Up With Your Phone and her latest book, The Amazing Generation, co-authored with Jonathan Haidt and written directly for kids...

Nicole Guysi is a Family Transition Navigator at Encircle Families — Arizona's federally funded Parent Training and Information Center — but she's also a parent who has lived the reality of raising a child with a rare diagnosis and figuring out the role technology needs to play in their life. In this episode, Nicole shares what that journey actually looked like: the searching, the gaps, the wins, and the ripple effects on the whole family. If you're a parent trying to find the right tools for yo...

Dr. Alison Yeung is a family physician and mom of two who built a community of 125,000+ followers after spending a decade watching adolescent mental health visits climb in her practice — and connecting the dots back to smartphones and social media. In this episode, she breaks down what the research actually shows about screens and kids' developing brains, why Big Tech deserves more scrutiny than parents do, and practical steps families can take today — including her Six R's framework for navigat...

Laura Marquez-Garrett left a two-decade Big Law career to become one of the most powerful legal voices fighting for kids harmed by social media — and in March 2026, they helped make history. As counsel of record in the first-ever trial to hold Meta and YouTube liable for harming a child through addictive platform design, Laura joins us to break down what the $6 million verdict actually means, what the companies' own internal documents revealed about what they knew, and why they call this case "a...

Chris Tiffany brings a rare dual perspective to his role as Executive Director of Encircle Families — he's both a former special education teacher and a parent of a child with autism. In this episode, Chris shares what his statewide Arizona organization is seeing on the ground when it comes to students with intellectual and developmental disabilities and their access to technology. You'll walk away with a clearer picture of where the gaps are, how families are finding (and missing) critical reso...

James Billig is Chief Compliance Officer at U-ACT (United Against Child Trafficking), a nonprofit equipping law enforcement and communities to fight online exploitation. He shares what officers are seeing on the front lines, how U-ACT's Blue Taskforce is training retired law enforcement to combat child trafficking, and the red flags parents need to watch for as predators evolve their tactics online. Resources mentioned in this episode: - https://u-act.org/ - https://u-act.org/donate/ - https:/...