For parents and teachers
Childhood in the real world
Our culture is saturated with screens, but there's a growing movement toward more analog ways of living: more play, more paper, more outside time. And because technology is unavoidable for this generation, media literacy is critical for adults and kids to understand how these technologies actually work, who owns the platforms, and how to navigate them safely and responsibly.
Free, no sign-up, and yours to print.
Decisions
The calls that shape a childhood: the first phone, the tablet, the bedroom at night. Each one gets a straight answer and three ways to act on it, so you can start where you are.
7 decisions
Conversations
What an algorithm is. Where AI got its material. Who pays for the feed. Every idea written four times over, for ages 4 to 6, 7 to 9, 10 to 12, and 13 and up.
11 conversations
We argue from what a childhood gains
Whether phones are behind the rise in teenage anxiety is still genuinely disputed among researchers, and we will not pretend otherwise. We do not need that argument. The case for analog stands on firmer ground, starting with arithmetic: an hour on a screen is an hour spent on something else.
Paper beats screen
Across 39 studies of about 1,800 young children, comprehension was lower from a digital book than from the same book on paper.
Furenes, Kucirkova & Bus, Review of Educational Research, 2021It is the portable ones
When researchers asked which screens actually cost children sleep, the answer was the devices that follow a kid into the bedroom.
Twenge, Hisler & Krizan, Sleep Medicine, 2019Play compounds
Unstructured free play in the early years predicted stronger self-regulation years later, and that capacity tracks with outcomes across a lifetime.
Colliver, Harrison, Brown & Humburg, Early Childhood Research Quarterly, 2022
Not sure where to start?
Answer a few questions about your kids and get a plan you can stick on the fridge. It takes about three minutes, and we do not ask for your email to give it to you.