Parenting AI
I've often said that in their factory settings, smartphones behave like children: they want your attention all the time, they don't share your mental map of what's important
“ treating child care like a combination of a lottery and a blood sport has never been a solution. It’s just been a secret.”
In some of my recent conversations about the pandemic and future of work, I’ve argued that our mass live-streamed work-from-home reality TV / social experiment has revealed just
One New Mexico school districts’ 4-day week
One of my old elementary schools, now closed and scheduled for demolition, Waynesboro, VirginiaPBS' News Hour recently had a piece about Bayard, New Mexico, a school district that
The “Think Differently About Kids” letter
JANA Partners and Calstrs have published a pretty amazing open letter calling for Apple to rethink its design of its products, with the aim of making them less
“Exploitation is encoded into the systems we are building”
Writer and artist James Bridle has a long, but rather amazing and disturbing, piece arguing that "Something is wrong on the internet." Specifically he's talking about how kids'
Boredom is hot!
Just in time for the end of summer and back to school, more pieces about the virtues and challenges of boredom. My friend Martin Schwirn points out this
“Children are always busy, even when they don’t look it:” Kids and deliberate rest
The Atlantic has an excerpt from a new book by psychologist Lea Waters, The Strength Switch, talking about the importance of free time and mind-wandering (or "free-form attention,"
Vacations, boredom, and stress: Recent articles and an upcoming radio show
I like to tell people that the only bad vacation is the one that you don't take. There's a ton of research on the benefits of vacations, both
Children’s drawings on the Origin of Species manuscript
I've written about my admiration of Charles Darwin as a husband and father, and the way he defied stereotypes of both Romantic Genius (which holds that really talented
Toy-free play
The Atlantic has a piece about the German practice of putting away toys in kindergarten for a period in order to encourage children to learn to rely more